Top of the Pops

The LA Weekly has published an interesting list of their top 10 fetish inspired bands. I have to admit that while I’d heard of the more obvious ones like NOFX, Genitorturers and Adam and the Ants, most of the list was new to me. I was particularly intrigued to learn that there used to be a Portland punk band called ‘The Submissives’ who wrote exclusively about femdom. Sadly they only released one album before their guitarist ‘Pig Champion’ passed away. You can listen to the album here. As a punk and thrash fan I kind of like it, but I will concede it’s definitely a niche taste. Fans of romantic ballads should steer clear.

This is an image of Gen, the lead singer from the Genitortures. They’re currently touring with another of the bands from the LA Weekly list – the Lords of Acid. You can catch them both via the Pretty in Kink tour.

Stairs to Nowhere

Ascending a red carpet staircase fashioned from the bodies of willing slaves sounds all very well in principle, but what happens when she reaches the end? Is there a light bulb there that needs changing? A hard to reach book? Or perhaps an annoying smoke alarm that will not stop beeping? If so, would it not be more practical to get the slaves to deal with the problem? She could find a chair, put her feet up, and watch the naked slaves try to form a human pyramid. That seems like it’d be a lot more fun.

The image is by Eric Madeleine and is from 1997. Despite my poking fun, I actually do like the shot. There are a few other equally striking ones on his site.

Plotting

This’d be a great image for a caption competition. It’s obviously a porn shot from the strap-on hell site, but what makes the image work isn’t the big fleshy fake dick, but the look being exchanged by the dommes. They seem to have a cunning plan in mind. If he’s lucky, it doesn’t involve the man at all. If it does, then God help him. I can’t think it’ll play out to his advantage.

A Small Dose of Sanity

I spend a lot of time on this blog writing about censorship and stupid regressive laws against sex and sexual expression. It therefore makes me happy to share a rare instance of legal common sense. Amazingly, it’s from the UK, where the obscenity laws have been revised to allow depictions of BDSM, watersports, fisting, face sitting, etc. 

In recent years the UK has been leading the way in the crusade against pornography, so it’s heartening to see some small amount of sanity return. Credit to Myles Jackman and Pandora Blake for all their work and activism in this area.

In the circumstances, it seems only fitting to feature an image from Pandora’s own Dreams Of Spanking site. This is from a scene call The Training of Tai Crimson.

Papers, Please

This image is a fabulous item of femdom memorabilia. It’s a passport for the Other World Kingdom, more commonly known as OWK. For those that have never heard of it, OWK was a femdom micronation, designed to be an order of magnitude bigger and more immersive than your typical pro-domme playspace. This previous post contains some useful links that provide more context.

I knew that Queen Patricia ran it like a self-contained kingdom, with its own laws, flags and currency, but I didn’t realize they went as far as issuing official looking passports. This particular example belongs to Dominatrix Irene Boss,  and was featured in this tweet from her. I particularly like the fact that slaves weren’t issues passports but were instead simply listed by a count, alongside the number of animals she was travelling with (see this inside page).

Dominatrix Irene Boss is a Pittsburgh based pro-domme. You can see her official site here.

Adding Insult to Injury

Some days you just want to punch something. This would unfortunately be one of them.

The initial trigger for this anger was seeing that Alchemy Rooms, the playspace of UK based Mistress Tess, had been broken into and vandalized. You can see some of the results in this tweet and this one. It pretty clearly wasn’t a burglary or random destruction. This was some fuck head on a targeted mission to ruin the space.

As often happens these days when something like this happens, a GoFundMe was set-up to help Mistress Tess out. I was actually planning to feature a link to it in a post today. Yet, incredibly it got shut down because of some vague and unspecified terms of service violation. These was nothing pornographic in the appeal, the funds were clearly going to fix the vandalism, and the police had been informed. Professional domination is entirely legal in the UK, but apparently the merest suggestion of BDSM is enough to get a very worthwhile appeal pulled.

The good news is that, according to this follow-up tweet, Mistress Tess will at least get the money that had been raised before the shutdown. But if you ever needed a story that encapsulates the many challenges that sex workers face, this one pretty much captures it all. In the meantime, if you want to support Mistress Tess, then buy some of her clips.  You get femdom porn and she gets money to help rebuild her space. Which in turn she can use to make more money and give people amazing kinky experiences. It’s a win-win-win.

You can see more shots like this at Mistress Tess’ main site. Her clips can be purchased at clips4sale and iwantclips.

A Brief but Very Expensive Session

I really enjoyed the Wonder Woman movie, but the panels below make me think I should also investigate some of the more recent comics. It’s from Sensation Comics featuring Wonder Woman #20 and you can see more of the surrounding panels from this scene here. It seems to be a very fun take on the character. Of course thanks to FOSTA, Craigslist has already dropped its personals section, so I guess a major felony is now the only way to get beaten up by Wonder Woman. So much for these new laws cutting down on crime.

I originally found this via a tweet from Alice in BondageLand.

Down and Dirty with Big Data

I found this article on pornography producers and their use of data mining interesting. I particularly liked the similarity it surfaces between popular science reporting and porn trends reporting. In both cases the media uses a few random and limited data points to spin a click grabbing headline. So on one hand we get that dark chocolate makes you smarter and on the other  we find that millennials don’t like boobs.

It also illustrates the degree to which porn is being targeted to the niches where customers are willing to pay. Although it seems to miss a pretty big part of that story. It talks about the major producers and the amateur community, but skips over the clips sites like KinkBomb,  Clips4Sale and iwantclips. The producers of that content might not be running data mining jobs on their sales data in the cloud, but it is typically very highly targeted niche material created by professionals based on customer feedback and requests.

Perhaps the most interesting question here is the one that’s almost impossible to answer: Does porn simply reveal existing kinks or create new ones? Is it leading or following? The article mentions incest as a topic that has been a big growth area. I’d also say cuckold porn is another one that seems to have gone from almost nothing to a major sub-genre in just a few years. But is this growth simply the result of a more efficient and anonymous market place? Is the number of potential cuckold fans a constant and they were just badly served before? Or is there a feedback effect, created from the prevalence of sexual imagery and more complex sexual dynamics that create more wannabe cuckolds? It’ll take more than a pornhub analyst and a database of page views  to answer those questions.

Of course I couldn’t possible mention cuckolding porn and not post some shots from it featuring odd facial expressions. They’re a staple of the genre. This is from the Submissive Cuckolds site.

The Importance of Hydration

This tweet from Victoria Rage made me smile…

Every Domme about to attempt a golden scene has a secret stash of multiple beverages hidden away to better the odds of making things happen. Look hard enough and you can almost always tell what’s in store.

That’s very true. Whenever I spot a domme regularly swigging liquids during a scene, I have a pretty good idea of what’s to come. However, sometimes it turns out the domme was just feeling dehydrated, and then it’s a little disconcerting.

We’ll get to the end of the session and she’ll be  – “Well that was fun. Take care. See you next time!” And  I’ll smile, hug and wave goodbye, but internally I’ll be thinking – “Huh? What’s going on with all that liquid? Don’t tell me it’s simply going to be flushed down the toilet! What a waste.”

I’m not sure of the original source for this artwork, but I do like the caption. ‘Ah!’ indeed. But is that his satisfied exclamation or hers?

Extreme Breathplay

Rolling Stone magazine has an interesting article on waterboarding as a kink. It features Elise Graves, the bondage aficionado I played with and posted about last week.

Waterboarding is certainly a more extreme kink, although I think its intensity can vary dramatically depending on how it’s done. I actually experienced it a couple of times a few years back, but not in an inverted position and not with a huge amount of water. I was basically horizontal and could lift my head slightly, which meant the water tended to drain away from my nose and mouth. I suspect that makes a big difference to the degree of terror induced. The coldness of the water triggered the mammalian diver reflex, which combined with bondage and a D/s dynamic created quite an unusual and intense headspace.

It’s a kink I could never have indulged in during the years when America was actually using the technique to torture prisoners. That’s not entirely logical – what I did in a Seattle playspace had no bearing on what the government did thousands of miles away – but it felt wrong and immoral to get sexual kicks from something that was being used in such a horrible way. When I did eventually try a lightweight version of it, years after Obama banned its usage on prisoners, we still avoided any kind of interrogation dynamic or roleplay. That seemed too close to a terrible reality.

Of course water and cloth is just one way to take someones breath away. As this Rodzo artwork shows, there are other options.