Pigeonholing (sadly not a kinky technique)

I want to follow up yesterday’s post with a further point about variety in the sexual realm. Although it’s more of an observation on the perception of kink than a specific point.

In non-sexual situations everyone implicitly understands that what you enjoy is situational and variable. Sometimes I want a sandwich, other times I want a fancy meal with matching wines. Tonight I’m watching a moody existential French thriller, tomorrow I’ll catch up on my political comedy via some Colbert Report episodes. Nobody assumes that liking one thing precludes liking other things.

Yet in the sexual realm that assumption crops up all the time. If you like men you can’t like women. If you’re kinky you can’t enjoy conventional foreplay and sex. If you’re dominant you can’t enjoy giving oral sex. If you enjoy pain you can’t enjoy cuddling. Stating a sexual preference often seems to pigeonhole people in a way that other preferences don’t. I’ve been shocked by how many people assume that because I’m a male submissive that I always need a leather clad whip wielding dominatrix to get off.

Admittedly there are people out there who only respond to their very specific fetish. If the only way you can orgasm is by dressing as a penguin and having a large blonde lady in a viking outfit throws herring at your head, well you have my sympathies. But I suspect you’re in a minority, and not just because of that particular fetish. I think for most kinky people, their kinks expand their interests and options, not confine them. And that’s probably a fact we should talk more about. Doing so might encourage people to explore their sexual interests and not fear that they’re heading down a path of depravity that’ll ruin their lives and existing relationships.

Tongue Biting

I thought this image of some simple kissing and biting made a nice contrast to yesterday’s complex scene. I found this on the Fucking Cuddle tumblr.

Keep it complicated

There’s a class of people who see every activity as a competitive event. There’s a right way and a wrong way, and they’ll be very happy to loudly tell everyone which is which. These people are annoying. There’s a further sub-class of them who insist that only the simplest most straightforward things can be right. Dinner should be steak, drinks should be beer or unadulterated spirits and sex should be good old PIV fucking. Anyone making life more complicated than this is pretentious, weird and fussy. I find these people incredibly annoying.

Variety in life is a wonderful thing. Both simple and fancy have their place. I personally hate discovering that I don’t like something. I feel like I’m missing out on a pleasure others get to enjoy. Anytime I see some incredibly elaborate kinky set-up I don’t think ‘Wow, that’s so unnecessary.’ I think ‘Fuck yeah! Go for it.’ I’m always happy to see someone doing something above and beyond, even when it’s not my personal kink.

Take for example this article in Serious Bondage and the scene in the image below. This has Mumman trapped in a small cell set into a deck, wearing a leather armbinder, a chastity device and a tight gasmask. Mme Suzanne is blowing smoke into the breathing tube and pulling the string attached to the chastity device. That’s not a set-up that I’d personally enjoy or want to try, but I love the fact there are people passionate enough to set these kind of scenes up. Sex is a hugely important part of life, yet as a culture we often seem to frown on people who invest major effort and time into their fantasies. We should be celebrating their effort and inventiveness.

Mumman and Mme Suzanne

Gangs of New York

One look at their footwear tells you these are not people who actually ride motorcycles. Yet I still like this shot. The old school British motorbikes are very stylish, as are the leather outfits. As an image it’s almost a double cliche. It was shot for Vogue by Peter Lindbergh in 1991, and obviously apes the biker iconography of the 50’s. Yet looking at it now, it is also a great example of the kind of supermodel photo shoots that were so common in the 80’s and 90’s.

Wild at heart

The models featured are Naomi Campbell, Karen Mulder and Helena Christensen. The photographer was Peter Lindbergh. You can see more images from the shoot here.

Perfect predicament

There’s no image for this post, because what I want to share is an M/f scene. Typically I shy away from posting M/f material, even when I think the techniques displayed are really cool. This is after all a femdom blog. However, this particular zipper scene is so fun I can’t help but link to it. I love the idea of tormenting someone to the point where they ‘voluntarily’ hurt themselves. Lydia is a genius at combining pleasure with pain, and this reminds me of the kind of tricks she likes to pull.

Never interview naked

I thought this was an interesting article on how we intellectually react to an image of someone naked. The simplistic view is that we objectify them, treating them as less than human. The article claims that it’s more complicated than that, and that while we do consider them less intelligent, we also think they’re more sensitive.

In one experiment … the photo showed either just the head or also the shirtless torso. When presented shirtless, targets were seen as having less competence. This is just what you might expect from research on objectification: we’re easily induced to see others as mere objects, pieces of meat without thoughts of their own. But it wasn’t that simple. Shirtless targets weren’t seen as devoid of all thought. They were actually seen as being more capable of emotions and sensations than their less exposed selves. They didn’t have less mental life but a different mental life.

They even used Timothy Greenfield-Sanders Porn-Star Portraits book in one experiment and found that varying the sexuality of the pose simply moved people along the lower-competence/higher-sensitivity curve. True objectification never actually occurred.

Given that all the personal images posted on this blog feature a naked me, I can only assume my readers think I’m a delicate and emotional creature, who is thicker than a whale omelette. This also has interesting implications for the CFNM fetish. Often that’s treated as a power dynamic or a humiliation scene. I now wonder if there’s also a degree of subconscious role reversal in it for some men. Cultural cliches categorize women as emotional and men as intellectual.  Based on the above finding, CFNM images would reverse that broken stereotype.

Walkies!

I thought this image (found on homer’s blog) was an appropriate one to use for a couple of reasons. Firstly, it’s obviously a CFNM shot. But it’s also an animal roleplay, and that seems to align with the intellectual/sensitive split. We don’t think of animals as competent. Nobody expects their dog to balance the household accounts or fix that leaky tap in the guest bathroom. But we do assign a lot of emotional attributes to pets. Dogs are seen as particularly dumb but sensitive, which is apparently much like our views on naked humans.

Bloggy thoughts

I found writing yesterday’s post updating the blog page a touch depressing. Not because of the blogs that I listed, but because of the small number I had.

Whenever I find a potential blog to add (via comments, emails, blogrolls, etc) I bookmark it and keep an eye on it. My criteria for inclusion is pretty simple. It has to be something I want to read. It has to make an effort to spell and punctuate correctly. It has to be updated occasionally. Nothing more than that. Yet so many fail, and almost always on the third criteria. I had around a dozen or so blogs to look at, and when I came to update my page most had either been deleted or become dormant. It’s the same story when I look at people’s blogrolls. Most blogrolls are full of blogs that have ceased to be, are bereft of life and rest in peace. Clearly even the blogroll owners aren’t even looking at them.

There are plenty of articles giving advice on how to write a successful blog, and I’m not going to repeat them here. However, I will make two points that seem particularly relevant to kink blogs, as there’s a couple of pitfalls I regularly see kinky bloggers stumble into.

Firstly, if you want a long lived blog, don’t begin by writing enormously long posts. Every blogging guide suggests posting frequently, and long posts are anathema to that. I think most kinky people get so few chances to express themselves openly that starting a blog triggers a rush of writing. They’re very excited to be sharing a secret part of themselves and want to get all these important hidden thoughts out to the world. Unfortunately a huge wall of text is not great for attracting readers. More importantly, it associates a high cost to writing posts. Once that initial thrill has faded, the thought of continuing to update at that same level of posting is very off-putting. Rather than switch to a more manageable post style, a lot of bloggers simply give up.

Secondly, come up with a variety of post styles that you can switch between. Writing very personal posts about your experiences and relationships is great. And if your life is a continuous whirl of crazy people doing extreme things in unusual places then that’s probably all you need. But for most of us, even those with kinky personal lives, it’s tough to continuously sustain a personal storyline that’s blog-worthy. Great writers can make any situation interesting, the rest of us need a little help from the subject matter. Personally I have a grab bag of post styles I pick from, which I mentally categorize as: Pretty picture, mainstream idiocy, interesting article, my kinky play, BDSM politics, thought for the day, etc. Having those existing mental templates for posts makes regular blogging much easier. There’s no reason anyone should follow my mix of post topics, but blogs that stick purely to ‘my kinky play’ as their subject matter do seem to have the shortest lives.

I’ll finish with a picture of a typical femdom blogger in action. I’m sure all the best posts are written this way. Don’t burst my bubble and tell me otherwise.

Blogging

I found this image on the Her Butler tumblr. I think it’s a particularly apt one to use, as I’m pretty certain the blogger in question is Ms Marie. For a time she wrote a really excellent femdom blog which featured a lot of shots from her personal life. Sadly, as is often the way of blogs, one day it just vanished with no explanation. The images of her and her husband still pop up on tumblrs from time to time, and they always make me smile. Whatever she’s doing now, I hope all is going well for her.

Updates to femdom blogs page

Today was the turn of the femdom blogs page to receive some housekeeping. I deleted a few blogs that died, tweaked the blog list on the right, and added the following new entries…

Hopefully there will be a few interesting links and posts there for readers.

The image below doesn’t have a direct connection with any of the blogs. They just looked like a couple having some kinky femdom fun, and that’s something I wish for all my fellow themed bloggers and readers.

Bondage and Laughter

The image is originally from the Tightly Tied site. I found if via the Kink on Wheels tumblr.

Fashion victim

I’m back in freezing Seattle after my jaunt down the coast to California. From a food and friends perspective the trip was a storming success. If you’re in LA and looking for great restaurants I’d strongly recommend Scratch Bar, Ink and hinoki & the bird. They were the three standouts of all those I tried.

From a kinky perspective it wasn’t quite as successful. The original person I planned to see had a scheduling conflict and we never could quite align our calendars. Then my alternative choice turned out to be sick and unable to play. At that point, rather than ringing around for a last minute beating, I decided it simply wasn’t meant to be. Instead I went clothes shopping in Beverly Hills. That’s an entirely different level of masochism. The sales assistants might not dress in leather, but they can certainly inflict punishment. I got a figurative screwing that was more expensive than a literal one. Although at least I ended up taking more home than a sore bottom.

The topic of clothes and fashion does give me an excuse to feature some fashion based femdom. This is for voodoo hosiery and taken from their 2010 ad campaign.

Voodoo Hosiery

Talking over a bear

This rather intriguing artwork is by the artist Waldemar-Kazak. It’s called ‘Talking over a bear’ and you can see the original full size version over on his Deviant Art page. I’m not exactly sure what the story is behind it. There’s a very 50’s feel to it, an edge of melancholy created by his expression and a weird sexy vibe (at least in my strange brain). It looks like it should be an illustration for a twisted short story in something like the New Yorker.

Talking Over A Bear

I originally came across this in the Femdomarts tumblr.

Get a grip

Apologies for the short post. I’m having fun at a friend’s 40th’s birthday party. Drinking, eating, and stories of the ‘oh my God you didn’t!’ variety are on the menu. Time for blogging is limited. Time for sober blogging is almost non-existent. The best I can offer is images that catch my eye. I’ll therefore leave you with something that isn’t overtly femdom,  but has a strong femdom vibe to it. She looks like someone with a firm handle on the situation.

Good Grip

I found this image via the In A Humbler tumblr.