Two Pets

Here’s an image for anyone who prefers their femdom with a dose of sci-fi, fetish and dehumanization. As is often the case, clothing designers of the future will clearly favor hotness and style over practicality and warmth. That’s a trade-off I’m personally OK with, assuming everyone looks as good as this.

This is by the artist HamletMachine, creator of the comic Starfighter. A lot of her work seems to skew towards more yaoi style man on man action than femdom. If that sounds like your kind of thing, you can read about the comic here, buy prints here and there’s an interview with her here.

Curious Cat and Mistress Madeline

I stumbled across the Curious Cat page of Madeline Marlowe (aka Mistress Madeline) today.  It’s one of the better kink related ones I’ve that I’ve found. A couple of interesting snippets stood out.

Back in 2014 an Australian man paid $42,000 in an auction for a 1 hour webcam session with her. I wrote about it at the time. It turns out that he never did the actual webcam session. He got off on the financial transaction, not the personal interaction. That’s definitely a case of YKINMKATGBYKISRE – Your Kink Is Not My Kink And Thank God, Because Your Kink Is Really Expensive.

The other part the stood out was her comments about the dark haired submissive she filmed a lot of her scenes with prior to moving to kink.com (for example this image). If you saw any of her early femdom work, it’s likely you’ve seen the two of them together. I always liked their dynamic in the few images and clips that I saw. Not sure I could say why that was. Maybe because they did a lot of scenes together over time, which implied an ongoing dynamic, and he seemed like a regular dorky guy, which I could relate to. Mistress Madeline has a slightly different theory on that…

I think what made those videos so relatable maybe is because he was one of the most terrible submissives I’ve ever had long term training with. He had many weaknesses and I gladly exploited them, but he was incredibly selfish and as a young domme in training I soon realized that the relationship was not serving me anymore

Apparently she ended the relationship by filming a scene with him bound in a warehouse and walked away, leaving him there, without a backward glance. As dramatic ways to end a relationship go, that’s a pretty good one.

This is obviously a shot of Mistress Madeline taken from her days with kink.com and the Whipped Ass site.

Tea for Two

This is one of those strange fashion shots where I can think of only two explanations. Either the photographer isn’t kinky at all, but wanted to shoot something that was, and so just threw a bunch of random kinky stuff into a scene. Or the photographer is extremely kinky, with a very specialized niche taste, and is therefore shooting on a frequency I just can’t pick up on. Whichever of those it is, I do like the china and her beautiful red corset.

This was shot by Aleksandar Alek Živković for Vice Serbia. I found it on labstrakt’s tumblr.

Table for Two

I’ve eaten at many amazing restaurants, but I’ve sadly never enjoyed a table with this kind of backdrop. I think it’s worth a Michelin star all on its own.

Google translates the text as “I take my male in patience” while Bing translates it as “I’m taking my male patient”. Neither one really sounds right, so if I’ve any French speakers out there who can help with a better translation, please let me know via a comment.

Update: Thanks for the many helpful comments on this. I’ll quote Mlle Sadie who gave this description…

This is a play on words. “Prendre son MAL (instead of MÂLE) en patience” is a French expression meaning to endure, with resignation, some pain (physical or psychological), some uncomfortable circumstance (think “pain in the ass”!).

So, mal (pain) and mâle (gender) are homonyms the artist has interchanged. The Woman thus endures Her male as/with a “pain in the ass”.

I believe the artist is known as Ladamen Rouge and this was created in Saint Etienne.  Thanks to a helpful comment, this may also be be a collaborative piece with an street artist known as Miss Tic or Miss Trick.

 

Face Funnel

Regular readers of this blog will know I’m not a big fan of hoods. I have to make an exception in this case however, because this one is just so fucking hot. There’s something incredibly objectifying and utilitarian about it. I’m not sure I could cope with wearing it in reality, but I do love the idea of it.

This is from Mistress Natsumi’s twitter feed.

More thoughts on privacy

I thought I’d share a few more follow-up notes to my previous post on Protonmail and Gmail.

One discussion I’ve seen pop up multiple times on social media is the need for everyone to use encrypted email. The argument goes that if a client is on gmail, it doesn’t help if a sex worker is on Protonmail. The email thread will still end up stored on an unencrypted server, so what have you gained? And since getting everyone to use Protonmail is unrealistic, why bother using it at all?

I think that viewpoint somewhat misses the mark. Privacy online, much like in the physical world, is rarely about perfection. It’s about minimizing risk and guarding against the most likely routes of attack.

If a zealous prosecutor crawled the web for sex worker web sites, or got hold of the database from a forum site or advertising site for sex workers, it’d be pretty easy to compile a list of email addresses for workers who were based in his part of the world. I’d also assume (although I’m not a legal expert) that, given both the source of the email data and the current political climate, showing probably cause to get a warrant would be straightforward. Just throw around the magic word ‘trafficking’. For anyone on Gmail (or a similar unencrypted service) that’d result in exposing all their correspondence with all of their clients.

In contrast compiling a list of client email addresses is a lot trickier. Most people use entirely separate accounts that are isolated from their public presence. I certainly don’t email pro-dommes from my work email or as paltego. These random email addresses typically aren’t on the web and don’t have a lot of associated information. So it would seem to me that, even if you could find one, showing probably cause is now a lot harder. Finally, even if a prosecutor can jump through all those hoops, all he’d get would be the correspondence of one client. That’s a lot lower level of information leakage than all the emails from a sex worker to all her clients. That reduces the cost/benefit ratio for a prosecutor, and hence makes it a less likely route of attack.

It’s obviously better to push as many people as possible towards secure email. But I don’t think you have to insist that it’s all or nothing. A sex worker who uses Protonmail and communicates with people on a mixed collection of email platforms is, in my view, still better off (from a privacy perspective) than one who just uses Gmail.

Similarly, while a modern smartphone with encryption enabled isn’t perfectly safe, it’s certainly better than one without encryption. And tech companies are constantly working to identify and close security holes.  You can also enable encryption on modern Windows/Mac PCs and laptops. It’s not a magic bullet to give 100% security, but it’s better than not having it. Defense in depth is the key.

Of course, if you want to avoid online risk entirely, then the only way to be sure is to go old school like this office. Not a computer in sight. Just a pen and paper for her office boy. Hopefully she has a crosscut shredder to dispose of his work once it’s done.

This is of course the lovely Mistress Eleise in an old photograph from Femme Fatale Films.

Euphoria – Beauty In Pain

I’ve some follow-up thoughts from yesterdays post on Protonmail vs Gmail to share. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time to get them down right now. So consider this an interlude, a little visual intermezzi, before returning to the more boring technical stuff.

The images below are from this Vice article on the photographer Carolin Auer  who is working to capture some of the authentic pain and emotions that go into BDSM play. The ultimate goal is a book entitled Euphoria – Beauty In Pain, which is currently still in the production stages. It looks like it’d be an interesting title for fans of the marks, cuts and bruises that kinky play often leaves behind.

Protonmail vs Gmail

When the FOSTA-SESTA bill was passed into law there was a rush of sex workers and clients moving from Gmail to the enhanced security of Protonmail. Since then I’ve noticed a backlash to Protonmail, with complaints about its reliability resulting in some people moving back to Gmail. At the same time I’ve also observed some confusion about the security issues involved, with comments like “Gmail uses encryption anyway” or “I’m on a VPN, so why does it matter?” Obviously, everyone can make their own judgement call about utility vs security, but I’d like that decision to be an informed one. Hence, this post to dig into the issues.

When it comes to encryption, Gmail does use an encrypted connection between you and their servers. That’s nothing unusual. So does pretty much every internet service that carries personal data (banking, shopping, email, etc). That’s necessary to stop people in your building, coffee shop or  IT department sneaking a look at what you’re sending and receiving. Obviously this is a good thing, but pretty much irrelevant when it comes to law enforcement. Even if they could do it (which they can’t), they’re not going to try and hack your internet connection and reconstruct your emails from the data you send.

Similarly, while a VPN (virtual private network) is generally a good thing for privacy, it’s irrelevant when it comes to law enforcement and email. Normally, even with encrypted connections, it’s still possible to see what sites someone is visiting. With a VPN, a remote computer (typically in another country) makes all those connections for you, and you just have a single encrypted connection to the VPN. That’s great if you don’t want someone to be able to trace your interactions with sites like eros or slixa, but kind of pointless when it comes to Gmail. If you’ve got a public web presence tied to a known email account, there’s absolutely no value trying to hide the fact you’re connecting to that email service. The fact you’ve got the email address on your website proves that you must be using the service.

The key difference between Protonmail and Gmail is how the data is stored on the email servers. In Protonmail the data is encrypted so that even the people running Protonmail can’t read it. That is absolutely not true for Gmail. Google’s entire business model is based on mining user data. In some cases it’s even possible for third parties to access the data. As Google describes here, they will produce the content of your Gmail account in response to a search warrant. And, as they document here, they produced user data for around 80% of the legal requests they receive each month. So if a prosecutor has your Gmail address and a search warrant, he can read your emails. The bar for obtaining a search warrant is simply showing probable cause. That is not a high bar. In contrast, even if US  law enforcement managed to get hold of Protonmail data, it would be a jumble of meaningless numbers. They’d need the account password to make sense of it.

One could argue that there are easier and more likely ways for law enforcement to hassle sex workers than trying to access their email accounts. Or that if an investigation has reached the point of getting search warrants, it’s unlikely to be stopped simply by a lack of email data. However, in the current climate, I tend to take the view that safer is always better. Would you want to bet against the possibility of a prosecutor going on a fishing expedition after scraping the web for pro-domme and escort email addresses? Or getting hold of the data from sites like eros or slixa and then using some bullshit sex trafficking story to get a load of warrants signed off? No tech company is going to want to be perceived to facilitate sex trafficking, even if the trafficking story is a fiction with zero relationship to reality.

As I said at the beginning of the post, the utility vs security trade-off is a matter for individual judgement. But nobody should assume that there isn’t a trade-off involved here. Gmail and Protonmail offer very different levels of privacy. Personally, even though pro-domination is legal and I only engage in non-sexual BDSM activities, I’ve switched to Protonmail for my personal account.

If anyone has questions about any of this feel free to leave a comment. I’m absolutely not a legal expert, but I do know a bit about computers and networks. I also added some follow-up thoughts in a subsequent post.

This domme certainly takes security seriously. She doesn’t ever turn her computer on. That’s hardcore security.

As far as I can tell the website originally associated with this image has ceased to exist.

Hush

This shot is a personal one from ‘The Worst Photographer Ever‘ tumblr. Clearly his tumblr is inaccurately titled, partly because there’s a far worse photographer writing this post, and partly because I think it’s a very sexy image. It’s interesting to have the man staring into the camera and the woman focused on the action, when the stereotypical shot is always the reverse of that.

Gagging On It

A final concluding post (for the moment) on combining different sexual activities with being a dominant woman. I hadn’t planned this one, but then I saw this tweet from the dominant Miss Pearl and it was too perfect not to feature.

Good: I got more time to gag on his cock, which is a major fetish of mine.

Bad: I gagged on his cock so hard I deposited two tablespoons of throat goop on his dick with a bad plumbing noise and now I am shy.

Hopefully for Miss Pearl and her partner Brick it was only a passing shyness.

As I’ve said many times, there are no dominant or submissive activities. Only dominant or submissive attitudes. You can be a domme who loves gagging on cock or a submissive who enjoys tying someone up. What matters is what you bring to the activity and the dynamic you create.

I’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for this artist.