Cool Britannia

Despite the British theme, this is actually by an Italian artist, the great Milo Manara (featured previously here). At first and even second glance, I thought it was a watersports image, but she’s actually pouring from a bottle. From other images I’ve found – for example this one – it seems to have been used in a Strongbow Cider advertising campaign. Which I find quite extraordinary. If you’re selling a bright yellow liquid as a mass market beverage, why on earth would you want to make a urine connection? Or associate your product with toilet artwork like this?

I think it’s a great image, but even for those like me, who love femdom and watersports, it’s not the kind of thing I want in my head when I’m ordering a pint of something cool and refreshing at a bar. I guess if the bartender was hot and served it in this fashion, then maybe, but most British pubs don’t offer that kind of customer service. If they did, I might never have left the old country.

I found this on the Female Dominance in Mainstream Media tumblr.

Returning to life

Talking about tumblr sites (as I just was), I was happy to see Maria of Girls Rule, Subs Drool had started posting again. When tumblrs, or any kind of blog for that matter, goes dormant for a long period, 99% of the time they never come back. I always enjoyed Maria’s content choices and personal posts, so I was very happy to see this fall into that rare 1% of exceptions.

I found this on the Girls Rule, Subs Drool tumblr, but I’m afraid I couldn’t track down an original source.

The proliferation of animated gifs

It used to be easy to find appropriate images to illustrate my posts. I’d jump onto tumblr with a theme in mind and typically find something suitable within a few minutes. Now I try that and I’m faced with wall to wall animated gifs. They’ve gone from old fashioned and annoying web page gimmick to what feels like 90% of tumblr contents in a couple of years.

Ironically, like the Oatmeal, I’m actually a fan of animated gifs. They work particularly well for sex and kink shots. I just wish tumblr had an option to filter them out. Sadly, given the number of sites only producing movies these days, and the shift away from commercial image sets, I suspect it’s a trend that’s not about to reverse itself. With movies as source material, animated clips is the natural way to feature them.

In the meantime I’ll have to look further afield for good image sources. For example, the shot below is from twitter, specifically Mistress Amiko’s feed. So far twitter does not seem to have succumbed  to the animation craze in quite the same way as tumblr.

Scary Crusher

I’ve played with plenty of ball crushers in the past, and I’ve always been amazed by how my tolerances can change during the progression of a play session. As adrenaline surges and the body adapts, what can seem incredibly intense at the start can end up as background noise to whatever else is happening. However, I don’t think I’ve ever experienced a ball crusher designed quite like this. Those are some fearsome spikes. I’m not sure this would ever fade into background noise, no matter how many endorphins were pumping.

This looks like the kind of thing you might find in an exhibit on the Spanish Inquisition, but I stumbled across it via Mistress Lucy Sweet Kill’s twitter feed.

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?