After yesterday’s post and artwork I feel a whole sequence of tease and denial posts coming on. There are three artists in particular that always spring to mind when I think of that topic. The first of them is Kami Tora. The artwork below is a pretty classic example of his work in this area. Cute figures. Exaggerated body parts. A nice sense of tension. And a fair amount of spurting or trickling fluids. 
T & D
While I was slacking off in Vegas this past weekend it struck me that it was the ultimate tease and denial town. It dangles the idea of winning lots of money, but rarely follows through. It promises celebrity chefs running restaurants, when in reality all the chefs are off at their main spots in NYC, London, Paris or wherever. Clubs and bars are advertised on the basis of decadent and hedonistic delights, when they’re really just loud crowded rooms full of tourists. When it comes to sexual delights, stripping is the main industry, and that’s the ultimate in tease and denial. Lots of lithe flesh, and naked girls on laps, but no touching or any kind of sexual contact. For those into promised but undelivered pleasure it must be the ideal vacation spot.
I sound like I’m down on it, but I’m really not. I like visiting. I’m just way past the age where gambling, strip clubs and lining up for the latest hot club has any appeal. I like sitting in on a patio with a cocktail, catching up with friends and people watching. I used to think it was the place to go for no holds barred hedonism. Now I think of it as the blue balls capitol of the world.
This teasing image is called Guy Tickling and is by AleX00XelA.
Gratuitous filler shot
I just flew back from Las Vegas and the only thing now on my mind is getting a good nights rest. Sensible and thoughtful posts will therefore have to wait for another day. Instead I’ll keep the blog ticking over with some gratuitous imagery. I’m afraid I’ve no idea who this is, but she does look splendid in those jodhpurs.
Lovely Marks
I’m not exactly sure where this shot is from. It looks like an out-take from a porn shoot. Whatever the context, I do love those marks. I’m sure that would seem weird to most non-kinky people, and even a few kinky people, but there’s something very satisfying about post-play marks. I’m sporting some across my chest from a session with Lydia a couple of days ago, and every time I see them in the mirror I smile and rub them.
Slacking
I’m in Las Vegas for a few days of R & R. In an unusual turn of events I’ve actually got no kinky fun lined up for this trip. Just hanging out with friends, eating out and relaxing. I’ll try and keep the blog updated but updates may be a bit erratic.
One thing I always enjoy in Vegas is dressing smartly. It’s not exactly Monte Carlo (despite the namesake casino) when it comes to fashion, so a suit really stands out, while still looking good.
This is a photograph shot by Tibi Clenci for Elle magazine in October 2010. The models are Silviu Tolu and Andreea Diaconu.
Kink on Netflix
I’ve mentioned the James Franco documentary on kink.com in previous posts here. I’ve yet to see it, but that may be about to change. I just noticed it has been made available on Netflix’s streaming service. Not sure if what regions it’s available in, but I can certainly see it listed in the US. May be worth a look if you’re at all curious about one of the larger companies in the BDSM porn scene.
The image below is from the kink site TS Seduction and features the beautiful Yasmin Lee.
KinkBNB
You may have heard of Airbnb, the service that facilities property rentals between private individuals. Well now there is KinkBNB, a service that lets you rent other kinksters play spaces. Renting a play space obviously isn’t a new idea, but I’m not aware of any service for coordinating the process. Typically you’d need to hunt around different pro-domme sites and forums to see what was available. It seems to be mostly Californian spaces at present, but if the concept takes off, maybe there’ll soon be spaces soon available in every town.
Of course while well equipped play spaces can be fun, you don’t actually need one to get kinky. This couple seem to be having a good time in what looks like a hotel room. Or at least one of them is having a good time. It’s a little hard to ascertain the attitude of the other one.
Stick or Carrot?
After a couple of serious posts, here’s something a bit more lighthearted. Personally I’d be asking why does it have to be an either or choice? What’s wrong with some stick and carrot?
This is by ArrakisArt. The links at the bottom of the image no longer work, but you can find more of her artwork at this deviant art site.
Fetlife Fail
Fetlife has been in the news recently for all the wrong reasons. Somebody scraped a bunch of user data off it and published it on the open web. This wasn’t a hack. They simply created a normal free account, which just takes a few seconds, and then ran a script to browse the site and download user profiles accessible to all fetlife users. They claimed that this was to demonstrate the lack of security in Fetlife. That position was undermined somewhat by the fact that they only took data from female users under 30 years old and published it in a file called ‘The Fetlife Meatlist’.
Understandably this pissed a lot of people off leading to articles like this and this. While the person who did it is obviously an asshole, I can’t say I was particularly surprised. There have been numerous articles over the years highlighting this potential attack, as well as previous technical demonstrations of the approach. Of course that doesn’t much help the 99% of Fetlife users who are busy getting kinky rather than reading techy sex blog articles.
It’s tempting to say that you should expect anything published online to be public. That’s both true and missing the point. Privacy is not a binary concept. At one extreme you have things like password protected accounts for storing private cellphone photographs. At the other you have sites like reddit and blogs like this one. To access the former you need either a hacker or a security flaw in the storage system. To access the latter you just need a web browser and an internet connection. Neither provides guaranteed privacy, as a lot of celebrities recently found out. Yet expectations of the two are clearly different.
Social media sites like Fetlife and Facebook fall someone between those two extremes. The problem is that their business model of eyeballs and advertisers pulls them towards the openness of a reddit or a blog. The expectation of their users, particularly for a content sensitive site like Fetlife, pulls towards greater privacy and protection. To date it seems that Fetlife has biased towards its advertisers over its users. So yes, you should always work on the assumption that anything stored online may become public. But that doesn’t absolve Fetlife of the responsibility to strike the right balance between its business model and its users privacy.
In the meantime, if you do take kinky selfies, be careful how you share them. Although if anyone wants to send me some, I promise to be careful with them!
This is by the Belgium artist Benoit Feroumont, who posts his erotic work under the handle Gracy Gimp.
OWK
I found this to be a very interesting article on the Other World Kingdom commonly known as OWK. There’s also a Max Fisch thread on it with a couple of people who visited sharing their thoughts here and here.
While the idea of a Femdom focused micronation is a fascinating one, I always found the execution of it in OWK strange. It was set-up by a woman and allegedly run for the benefit of women, yet always looked to me like a male fantasy version of the concept. And not a well rounded nuanced fantasy. More the kind of erotic fiction that’s typed one-handed and late at night. The kind where big breasts and tight leather is compulsory but grammar and punctuation is optional. Where gaggles of gorgeous young women in boots are unspeakably cruel to naked men in dungeons 24 hours a day.
That’s not to knock anyone who visited it or enjoyed the idea of visiting. For people whose fantasizes aligned with it, or who just wanted to shoot kinky porn, then obviously there was a natural fit. It just seems a very narrow approach, which doesn’t seem ideal when you’ve got a multi-million dollar property to sustain.
There’s a lot of very classic femdom porn shots floating around from OWK (like this one), but I thought I’d try and track down a couple of the more interesting ones. The first features some unusual costumes and amused ladies. The second has more traditional fetish gear, but keeps the smiles going. It looks like a shot taken between scenes.
Although the facility itself has closed you can still subscribe to see the images and video from their online site.