Grassy notes, with a touch of asparagus and oak on the nose

I was flipping rapidly through my twitter feed the other day when I noticed a domme pitching her ‘selectively crafted artisinal pee’. Now I know a lot of dommes are proud of their healthy diets and the resulting liquid output, but ‘artisinal’ was a new one for me. Since the dictionary definition is something ‘traditionally created using non-mechanical means’, doesn’t that make all pee artisinal? Are their any mass produced golden showers out there for submissive on the go who doesn’t have the time to really enjoy an artisinal product?

Fortunately, when I flicked back to check out exactly what I’d seen, it turned out to be a random ad that twitter has snuck in for artisinal *tea*. Which made a lot more sense. I don’t think the world is ready for the intersection of the pretensions of the beverage tasting world with the kinky world of golden showers.

I’m not exactly sure where this is from, but that’s one very happy looking wet dude.

Balcony Shenanigans

It’s damp and cold in Seattle right now, which makes these recent shots by Lady Hinako and Jordyn Fox particularly appealing. I love their smiles in the first image.

I’m currently being inundated with Christmas cards featuring happy families in amazing locations. It used to be that Christmas cards were generic shots of Santa, stables, mangers, stars and holly. The card was generic but the the message personal. Now cards seem to be a physical version of Instagram, customized with photographs that emphasize what a fabulous lifestyle all my friends have. The cards are less greetings and more tribal markers of success. I think next year I’m going to arrange some personal images like this for my cards. You send me shots of your rugrats frolicking on a Caribbean beach, and I’ll send you shots of  me in bondage,  getting fucked up by gorgeous women in leather. If you want to highlight how well you’re doing at life, I think it’s only fair that I get to do the same in my own peculiar way. Or we could all switch back to Santa, holly and wreaths. I’m OK either way.

BDSMLR

With tumblr dead, the destination of choice for a lot of kinky blogs seems to be bdsmlr. A big part of me really wants the site to succeed. I was a fan of all the interesting erotic imagery on tumblr and would love to see somewhere that could migrate to. Unfortunately, right now I think that the jury is still out on bdsmlr.

At the moment they’re still struggling to deal with the influx of ex-tumblr folks and all the extra traffic involved. The site UI is a little clunky and lacks the polish of tumblr. It’s relatively easy to get some sort of service off the ground, but it’s tough to make it scalable, manageable and usable. There’s an old saying in software development that the last 10% of the project takes 90% of the work, and I think the site developers aren’t even into that part of the problem space yet.

Also, as Ferns pointed out via a comment, we don’t really know anything about the owners of the site. There’s no background on the company or the people. The original TOS they had was terrible, giving them rights to anything shared via their site. They did change that – making me think it was simply something they copy/pasted from elsewhere – but it does indicate a lack of diligence around a pretty critical area.

Probably the thing that most pisses me off about it is actually no fault of the bdsmlr team at all. It’s down to the clusterfuck that is SESTA/FOSTA. As it stands their TOS completely bars  usage of the site that mentions sex work. Any kind of paid service mention gets you banned. So we’re in a situation where 95% or more of the site’s content will be created by various types of sex workers, yet they will derive zero benefit from it. In fact they’ll be barred from the site should they try and extract some tiny benefit. Most social media sites have generally been very negative on sex to date, but it takes some special type of legal fuckery to create a site that’s positive about kinky sex imagery but entirely negative about the people who create it.

All that said, and having spent an entire post picking at its flaws, I would still encourage you to check out bdsmlr. The SESTA/FOSTA bullshit is not their fault, and it’s entirely possible they’ll shake off their growing pains and deliver a solid service. The basic idea is a good one. You have to register to browse it, but it’s an easy process, and only takes a minute or two. I like the idea, and should they become big and successful, maybe they’ll be in a position to help out in the ongoing legal battle over sex work.

Here’s another image from a now defunct tumblr that I archived for reference purposes – Continuous State of Desire. I’m afraid I don’t know the original source for the photograph.

Good Job Tumblr

The final banishment of adult content from Tumblr was an entirely predictable shit show. Huge swathes of carefully curated content vanished, including pretty much every link on my image page.  It was pretty depressing looking around it in the last few days, with a lot of people saying goodbye to their followers and goodbye to all the time they’d invested in the platform.

People who actually tried to follow the rules and clean up their site found that it was impossible to flip it back to a non-explicit status, rendering their site worthless. Meanwhile I found endless examples of very explicit images still being shown, often right next to images that were blocked. Either the blocked ones were so graphic they’d have made my eyes bleed or, more likely, tumblrs filtering algorithms are useless. So they destroyed a lot of online communities, pissed content creators off, lost a huge chunk of their users and still ended up showing people porn. All in all, a great week of work for them.

Luckily their incompetence does have a minor benefit. As I posted on twitter,  you can actually still use TumblThree to rip any tumblr back to your local hard drive. This includes tumblr’s that send you to the block screen or that have explicit images covered up. All the content is still there, and you can typically pull a tumblr with a few thousand images in just a few minutes. I’m sure they’ll close this hole pretty soon, but right now it’s still a good option for archiving any favorite sites you had.

In the meantime a lot of people  seem to be heading to bdsmlr as the tumblr clone of choice for kinky people. I get the logic of their name, but it doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. I’ll post some follow-up thoughts on that site tomorrow. In the meantime he’s an image from a tumblr that I definitely archived for my personal future ‘reference’ purposes – Alternative Femdom.

I believe this was originally shot by Alvaro Hernandez

Needles and Rubber Bands

I’ve posted images from a fair number of my sessions in 2018, but I don’t think any of them have been from my adopted hometown of Seattle. That’s not because I haven’t been exploring kink here. I took a break of a year or so after Lydia retired, but since I’ve been venturing out more into the Seattle scene. I suspect my lack of Seattle posts is probably due a sense of uncertainty. When you’re trying to figure out dynamics and what works, there’s little time left over for documentary footage. Fortunately in the last few months I’ve gotten a touch more grounded, thanks to a series of great sessions with the fabulous Ms Savannah Sly.

Leading up to the holiday period we did a couple of sessions that were just a week apart. A wide variety of kinky fun was featured, with a big part of it focused on my upper chest. The first session featured a beautiful array of needles as shown here. She started on the outside with the smallest gauge (25) and worked inwards, finishing with the biggest gauge (18). You can see the thickness variation in this close-up shot here. I have to say that while the result was very pretty, the ordering was particularly evil. The breastbone and thinner flesh makes the inner needles more painful, so combining that with the bigger gauge really got a good loud reaction out of me.

The second session featured (among other things) an innocuous office supply that turned out to be way more painful than a needle in the flesh. My schooldays  taught me that a rubber band could sting if someone fired it at you across a room. I just never knew just how painful they could be when applied at close range. This image shows the resulting stripe marks across my chest. A significant amount of screaming was involved in their creation. You can actually still see the bruising from the needles under them. I’ve seen plenty of femdom shots in office and school settings, but never have I seen the domme whip out a rubber band and start snapping it against flesh. They’re really missing out. I’ve still got the marks two weeks later.

I’d hate to leave everyone with the image of my bruised chest in their brains, so here’s a lovely spanking shot of Ms Savannah Sly from her site. She’s also on twitter here.

Sadie Hawkins

I was very sad to read of the death of Goddess Sadie Hawkins. She was killed in Phoenix yesterday. I never personally crossed paths with her, but I knew her from her reputation as an advocate,  community organizer and guest of honor at DomCon in LA. The DomConLA twitter feed is jammed with tributes from her fellow dommes, which I think speaks to how well like and respected she was. Vinyl Queen has put up a post with her thoughts about her friend here.

The 17th of December was the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, it’s almost certain that sex workers have had some sort of impact on your life. Maybe in person, maybe virtually or maybe just via the photographs and films they produce.  So please consider contributing to the Sex Worker Outreach Project. If you’d like to help Sadie’s family directly, there’s a GoFundMe set-up.

Goddess Sadie Hawkins taken from this tweet.

Slurping her Cherry

This very vore like image is actually a film poster from the 1970’s that someone has cropped and modified. You can see the original here. A site selling the original poster entitles it ‘Maraschino Cherry’ and credits the producer Radley Metzger.  I’m sure the original 70’s flick was a lot less kinky that the poster suggests. In those days the advertising of pornography and the actual pornography in question often had little to no connection between them. Plus, I doubt the vore kink was on anyone’s radar in the 70’s porn industry.

Mark Dektor – Switch

After all that recent verbiage on kinky thought experiments, I think its time to get back to some basic femdom. This image is by the Los Angeles based Mark Dektor. He has an exhibition called ‘Switch’ that has just started at the Artist Corner Gallery in LA.  As Isabella Sinclaire posted via her Instagram, he manages to create an amazing representation of the kinky world. Plus, he has shots of the fabulous Nina Hartley, which I think makes it instantly better than any other art exhibit, kinky or otherwise, that foolishly chooses to leave her out.

This is from this instagram post by Mark Dektor, and features Guerin Swing and Aine Patrick.

Final Thoughts on Two Kinkster Problem

This isn’t particularly femdom, but I think it’s interesting, so allow me to return one more time to the thought experiment I described previously.

It was actually inspired by a study Jonathan Haidt described in his book The Righteous Mind (which I’ve mentioned before). He came up with a set of scenarios that violated social norms in fairly disgusting ways, but didn’t actual cause any harm. For example, a man buys a chicken in a grocery store, takes it home and has sex with it before cooking and eating it. Is that morally wrong? Another one featured a family whose pet dog was run over, and rather than simply bury it, they cooked and ate it. He discovered that general disgust at the scenarios was universal, but that moral judgement varied. Wealthy liberal Westerners, brought up to believe in the primacy of the individual, tended to say nothing was wrong if no one was harmed. Almost everyone else outside that specific narrow group took the opposite view. They treated these major violations of social conventions as moral violations. Haidt went on to point out that the liberal western viewpoint of putting the individual first is actually the exception, both through history and in the world today.

I didn’t actually describe a scenario for Mary or Sam, but it’s pretty easy to come up with one that’d fit Haidt’s study. Imagine if they were roleplaying an actual lynching from the Jim Crow era South. I’d expect (hope) that people would find that disgusting but, assuming they never take it beyond the two of them in their playspace, there is no obvious harm to point at. From a purely Utilitarian viewpoint, they’re happy and nobody else is affected. Of course, the assumption that they can 100% compartmentalize their kinks is a big and questionable one.

Given that my readership skews to Western liberal (in the general rather than political sense) and given what I’d read in Haidt’s book, I predicted that most people would think Mark and Sam can’t do any moral harm in the original thought experiment. That did indeed seem to be consensus. I fit that mold myself. But it’s interesting to reflect that it’s an unusual viewpoint. The majority of people across the world and through history would not share it.

As I’ve said before, it’s tough to come up with an image for these kind of posts. Controversial activities tend to have controversial images. I’m going with an old shot from an ageplay scene in Taboo magazine. I’m not ageplay fan myself, but something about this image always worked for me.

The Two Kinkster Problem Revisited

Last week I posed a kinky thought experiment to consider. For clarity, let me restate it here, with a minor modification. The added italic text really should have been in the original version, as it closes a potential area of ambiguity.

“Mistress Mary and Submissive Sam, both risk aware consensual adult kinksters, enter their own deserted, well equipped private playspace and close the door behind them. An hour later they emerge sweaty, breathless and happy. They both tell you that they had a great time, and then go on their way with no ill effects or further interaction. Later you ask them what they did. At this point, is there anything they can say that’ll make you think they did something ethically or morally wrong?”

I suspect most of my readers would answer that there’s nothing they can have done that was ethically or morally wrong. That was certainly the gist of the comments I received, which didn’t surprise me. If you believe that, then you also must be ‘OK’ with extreme roleplays focusing on race, childhood, incest, Nazis, genocide, etc. Because in their hour alone, Mary and Sam might have indulged in the most heinous fucked up roleplay you can possibly imagine.

Note that by ‘OK’ in this context I don’t mean necessarily enjoying the idea of the activity, or wanting to try it yourself. Just that you’d say that no kink that can be done privately between consenting adults can ever be morally or ethically wrong.

I posed the thought experiment as a response to my ‘Pick a Side‘ post and the online debate I’d see about controversial activities. It seemed that the debate about specific activities was often muddied by the bad behavior of those who did them. I felt this thought experiment crystallized the issues more clearly.

In my original post I said that there was no wrong answer to the question, and I do believe that. While I lean to the anything goes side, I think it’s entirely valid to say that there are things that Mary and Sam can do that would be wrong. However, if you believe that, then I also think it’s incumbent on you to consider why you draw a line between activities and why your own favorite activities are OK in this situation. Kinky people are always keen to emphasize the difference between fantasy and reality. If you deny that boundary for some kinks, why not all?

It’s tricky to pick an image for a post like this. What Mary and Sam get up to in private isn’t necessarily something I want to broadcast to my readers. Nazi’s are certainly a controversial topic, but I think shooting a pair of them should be relatively safe, particularly when it’s done by the Lace Panty Commandos.