Well that was fun

Eagle eyed readers may have spotted that this site wasn’t quite itself over the last few days. There was a distinct lack of dominant women, images shamelessly filched from tumblrs and my random musings on the world. Instead there was a lot of ‘account suspended’ and ‘access forbidden’ nonsense. There were a couple of reasons for this.

The main problem was me being kidnapped by a posse of leather clad dominatrices who spirited me away to endure hours of painful torment and indescribable pleasure. In my absence the site obviously ceased to function and fell into decay. While you were wondering what ‘403 Forbidden’ meant, I was refusing to hand over my webmaster password to a lithe leather clad lady, no matter how vigorously she licked my nipples.

The other problem was of a more mundane technical nature. No leather or ladies involved. Just a hosting service that claimed my site was exceeding its allocated resources. I pay for my hosting, but apparently I wasn’t paying enough. So without any warning or notification it got cut off. It was so cut off that even I couldn’t log in or debug anything. Obviously as a dedicate webmaster who cares for his readers I wasn’t prepared to settle for that, and whipped out my credit card to splurge on an upgraded private server for the site. Unfortunately that took a day or two to set-up and for the DNS changes to propagate across the web. It also involved a lot of me yelling at the hosting company via their crappy ticket system. Fun times it was not.

Apologies to anyone who tried to access the site recently. Believe me, I was trying to fix stuff as rapidly as I could. By way of apology, please accept this rather fun image from Men In Pain. He might be screaming, but it still looks like a more relaxing situation than my last few days.

Torture

Food for thought (cont)

After that brief interlude, I’m back with a couple of final thoughts on the case of Gilberto Valle. If you missed the previous post then go read it from a couple of days ago. I’m not going to repeat myself, damn it.

One thing that repeatedly came up in the documentary on him was a variation on the slippery slope argument. Several people, including one of the jurors, expressed the idea that he was inevitably building up to committing a crime. Having started looking at sexually violent images, and moved onto discussion and chat, he’d feel ultimately compelled to up the stakes for bigger and bigger thrills. It’s an argument I’ve heard before about kink and it always strikes me as ridiculous.

In non-sexual areas we never assume people will lose all reason and control when exploring their passions. Imagine someone who is keen on flying. They start with buying a few magazines and video games on the subject. Then they begin visiting airshows and hanging out on pilot forums. Eventually they decide to get their private pilot license and fly for fun at weekends. Nobody is going to argue that the inevitable next step will be to sneak onto an military airbase and steal a fighter jet. That would certainly be a bigger thriller (and one guy even did it once), but we don’t assume the desire to fly will rob someone of their rationality. We typically explore an interest till we reach some sane limit based on cost, availability, legality, risk, etc.

Yet when it comes to sex a lot of people seem to believe that either you have a stable list of kinks and interests, or that you’re on one long slide into the abyss of depravity and illegality. I think it’s because people can only imagine two options. Either you’re satisfied with what you’ve got, or are never fully satisfied, and must therefore seek out stronger and edgier thrills. They have difficulty imagining more fluid and variable sexual interests that aren’t simply a constant escalation of sensation. Of course the situation isn’t helped by some crazy people who do escalate and go on to do horribly depraved things. But exception cases are always that – exceptional. It’s possible to explore non-consensual fantasies without ending up a rapist or cannibal, much as it’s possible to enjoy fantasies of medieval battles without hacking people to death with a sword.

I’ve no idea what was going on in Gilberto Valle’s head when he was chatting online. They were disturbing conversations, and I don’t think it was wise or ethical to feature his wife and friends in the chats. But much like free speech, it’s easy to defend something you agree with, harder and yet far more important to defend it when you don’t. In drawing a line between conspiracy and fantasy, we should always err towards giving the defendant the benefit of the doubt.

cat_and_spider_mouse
This image is from vore fan comics on DeviantArt and entitled Cat and Spider Mouse. Vorarephilia, as described by wikipedia, is the erotic desire to be consumed by, or sometimes to personally consume, another person or creature. Vore fantasies are separated from sexual cannibalism because the living victim is normally swallowed whole. Apologies if anyone is disturbed by the image, but vore does occasionally show up in femdom artwork, and it seemed appropriate given the original subject matter.

Interlude

I intended to write up some more thoughts to my post from yesterday. Unfortunately my first day back at work after the holidays got in the way. Too much to do and too little time. So instead here’s a naked man and a lady doing something to him. Probably a painful something. Think of it as a happy interlude between less happy thoughts.

Claw
I don’t have an attribution for this. I have a suspicion that the lady in question is a NYC pro-domme. But I’m not sure who or even why I think that. She just seems vaguely familiar. If anyone out there can supply a name and/or correct my suspicion please feel free to leave a comment.

Update: Thanks to my helpful readers I can confirm this is indeed a NYC pro-domme, specifically Mistress Trish, who I’ve featured here in the past.

Food for thought

A new year of femdom blogging is opening up before me. So what better way to get going than with some articles on a man who fantasies about killing and eating women? Not exactly femdom I know. If fact, about as far from femdom as you can get. However, the story does raise some important issues around fantasies and on-line behavior that are worth pondering.

The man in question is Gilberto Valle, a former NYC cop. He frequented fetish websites and chat rooms where he shared some very dark discussions around torture, murder and cannibalism. More problematically he used the names and photographs of his wife and female friends in these discussions. When his wife found out she was understandably horrified and told the police. He claimed the discussions were all fantasies. They claimed they were a conspiracy to commit a heinous crime. The jury believed the police and found him guilty. That conviction was then overturned by the judge who said he couldn’t be found guilty for a ‘thought crime’.

There’s a good article on the case, written just after his conviction, available from the New York Magazine. Slate has a follow-up interview with him after he was released. What prompted this post was a fascinating HBO documentary on the case called ‘Though Crimes’. I watched it last week and it raises some really interesting issues around how lines can be drawn between fantasy and reality. If you’re in the US and have HBO on-demand, it’s currently available there.

A key part of the goverment case centered on his Google searches. For a crime to take place there has to be intent – a substantial step taken towards committing it. In this case, lacking hard physical evidence, his searches were taken as evidence of intent. That’s a pretty scary jump to make. The barrier between having a thought and expressing it to a search engine is almost non-existent. How do you distinguish between the intent of someone trying to create a realistic fantasy and the intent to carry out that fantasy? How many of us would like to explain our search histories to the world? Or to defend them to a prosecutor trying to cast them in the worst possible light?

The law has evolved based on the physical world, where actions have costs in time/money/effort. That tells us more about intent. I don’t have much sympathy for the conviction of Chris Asch, one of the people involved in the online discussion, who amassed a very scary collection of tools. You don’t need to own a stun gun to write a good fantasy about using one. But the online would has essentially zero barrier to actions like searching, typing or clicking. One can only hope the law can evolve to incorporate this fact. An online search is much more like a thought than an action.

I generally think that incorporating real people into sexual or violent stories without their knowledge is pretty unpleasant and unethical. But if my opinion doesn’t sway you, and you write about dark non-consensual fantasies online, then keep this case in mind. If you end up as next weeks headlines, it might suck to be thought sick and weird, but that’s definitely better than adding dangerous and criminal into the mix.

– Image Removed by Request – 

Happy 2016

I hope all my readers enjoyed the last evening of 2015 and didn’t wake up too hungover for the start of 2016. Champagne is the traditional way to greet midnight on New Years eve, and  I always used to try and stash a bottle of good champagne away for that moment. However, experience has taught me that the time to drink the good champagne is at the start of the evening, when everyone will appreciate it. By the time midnight rolls around then anything the right color with a few bubbles in it will do.

The image below is from an advertising campaign for Dom Perignon champage. It was shot by Karl Lagerfeld and features Claudia Schiffer. I’m not really sure what the connection between the champagne and the fetish gear is, but that’s often the case with these kind of ‘artistic’ ads. I certainly wouldn’t object if my 2016 featured several bottles of Dom and a whip wielding Claudia Schiffer.

Dom Perignon campaign featuring Claudia Schiffer

A bad case of stupid

I’m sure that when Tim Berners-Lee was inventing the world wide web, he wasn’t thinking it’d be used to exchange amusing articles on penis related injuries. Fortunately for us his idea took off, and we now get to enjoy articles like this on what people did their dicks in 2015. Its culled from a database kept on emergency room visits and proves that no matter how delicate and sensitive an appendage, there’s no limit to the kind of stupid stuff people will do with it.

I’m kind of surprised there are no reports of injuries from kink and CBT. Possibly that means everyone deliberately torturing penises in 2015 were smart enough to do it without putting their partner in the emergency room. More probably it means that those who did end up there lied about how it happened.

CBTThis lady is hurting a penis the smart way. Clothespins are relatively safe. Unfortunately I’m not sure who she is or where the shot is from. As usual, if you know, please leave a comment so I can attribute it.

Update: The verdict from my astute readers is that this is Sandra Romain in a kink.com shoot.

Conservation of sexy

I don’t spend a lot of time looking at my blog visitor statistics. I used to check them religiously when I started blogging, but now I just check occasionally to make sure nothing weird is going on.

I glanced at them today and was amused to spot the change in traffic over the holiday period. Over the 24th and 25th of December the visit rate dipped significantly. Presumably this was because people were busy with relatives, cooking big dinners and exchanging presents. Then on the 26th and 27th there was a big upswing, which was almost exactly the same size as the dip had been. I assume that everyone who’d temporarily stopped browsing naughty pictures and sex blogs decided to do their post-holiday catch-up.

I wonder if there is some rule of the internet at work there? Just as energy is never created or destroy, only transformed, perhaps the overall amount of sex related browsing is never increased or decreased, only displaced? It’s the conversation of energy, just with less maths and more naked people.

If you were one of those people displacing their browsing of kinky blogs, then allow me to welcome you back with a rather lovely kinky picture. This is from Amaury Grisel.

SuspensionRopeBondage

Lending a helping hand

This news article on a Hull based dominatrix helping to feed the homeless om Christmas day put a smile on my face for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s obviously a very very nice thing for Hull’s Mistress Dita to have done. From reading the article it’s also not her first efforts in this area, so she’s clearly someone to be applauded. The second thing I like was the way the article itself was written. The word dominatrix was used in much the same way you might say ‘local business owner’ or ‘entrepreneur’. It’s rare for the press to resit the urge to make stupid comments about kink or BDSM or sex work whenever the chance arises. To see it treated with such a neutral tone makes a pleasant change.

Mistress DitaIf you’re looking for a pro-domme in the Hull area of the UK, then Mistres Dita certainly seems like a great person to connect with. Her site isn’t responding to me right now, but her twitter feed is very active and has contact info in it.

Wishing everyone all the best

If you celebrate Christmas, then I wish you a happy Christmas. If you just enjoy the holiday period this time of year, then I wish you happy holidays. And if you don’t do either of those, then I just wish you all the best and hope you’ve enjoyed my blog over the last year.

The image below is by Red Rump and was originally posted by him for Christmas 2013. Sadly his blog seems to have gone dormant for the last 6 months or so. I can only hope he’s in good health and that he returns with some more excellent artwork in the new year.

Christmas_RR