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.

More Tumblr Thoughts

I spotted a few pro-dommes suggesting that tumblr blocking porn might be a good thing, as it’d remove a source of free porn and push more people to buy from content creators. That’s an interesting thought, and it’s hard to know how these kind of changes will play out, but it does seem to miss some aspects of the bigger picture. Firstly, tumblr was also used by sex workers to advertise and attract clients. With it gone, the only social media site still friendly to sex workers is twitter. That’s a precarious situation to be in. Secondly, I think the broader internet ecosystem for kinky content has helped dramatically increase the potential audience for kink.

It’s tempting to divide the world into kinky and vanilla people. In reality I think there are three groups. There’s obviously those who have zero interest in it and those who’ll always be active in it. In the middle, and possibly the largest group, are the potential kinksters. For these people the broad availability of kinky imagery and writing is a gateway. It draws them in with fantasies and ideas that they didn’t realize was their ‘thing’ until they saw it. Seeing someone act out their kinks normalizes the idea of trying your own.

I’d actually put myself in that middle category. I think I’ve always been kinky, even before I knew what sex or BDSM was, but I’m not sure I’d have ever truly discovered or explored my kinks without the internet. I couldn’t have imagined broaching the topic with a partner or calling an unknown pro-domme from a card in a phonebox. It was porn that expanded my imagination and kinky bloggers that made me realize that this was something I could try out for real.

Obviously tumblr removing  adult content is not the same as it being removed from the internet. However, it was the largest and most user friendly of the porn hosting platforms. The more porn is pushed into the unfriendly corners of the internet, and the more it’s suppressed by search tools, the fewer conversions I think we’ll see from potential kinksters to actual kinksters. Which means fewer potentially kinky partners and fewer clients for pro-dommes.

These photographs are a great example of the kind of thing we risk losing. This is from Misingui’s tumblr, which features a lot of equally wonderful images. These two are from this post. Rigging is by Misungui, the model is Stan Briche and the photographer is Ludovica Anzaldi.

Bye Bye Tumblr

I’m sure most readers will have seen the news that tumblr is going to ban porn from December 17th. It’s depressing but, after their acquisition by Yahoo and then Verizon, not entirely surprising. I’ve written about the challenges of dealing with adult content in corporate environments in the past. As a relatively small independent platform with a history of being friendly to porn, tumblr would never have wanted to decimate its user base like this. For Verizon, its a case of cutting a fraction of users of one product in one division. The risk/reward calculation for them looks very different. Of course, that doesn’t make it any less a shitty and horrible thing to do to a community.

As Bacchus at ErosBlog has been pointing out for over a decade now, if you don’t own your domain and do your own hosting, you’re always going to be at risk of being screwed over by your platform of choice. Sadly that’s not really an answer for the average tumblr user. I’m lucky in having the time and resources needed to run a site like this one, but it’s definitely a non-trivial investment. The average tumblr user, who wants to post some hot photos and share some thoughts, isn’t going to want to spend an hour with tech support trying to figure out why his database has crashed and why /dev/dva1 has run out of space (as I did over the weekend).

Unfortunately, I don’t really know of a valid alternative that I can point people at. There are other platforms for sharing adult content (like imagefap and various tube/hub sites), but they tend to have horrible UI, dodgy advertising practices, poor community tools and a terrible attitude  to content creators. If I had VC level money, I’d be treating this as an opportunity to create a new platform and fill a sudden gap in the market. As it is, I can only keep my eye open for somebody else doing that.

In the meantime, there are tools for archiving your favorite tumblrs. Bacchus has a post on one approach. I’ve had some luck using TumblrThree, although it’s not exactly a polished UI. There are also people working on more broadly archiving tumblr content for posterity. If anyone else has either suggestions for archiving content or for good places to move it to, feel free to leave a comment here. I’ll share updates and suggestions as the situation evolves.

My own image page is packed with tumblr links, so it looks like I’ll need to delete most of those next week. This particular image is via 11dutch tumblr. I believe that is Mistress Baton.

Technical Issues

Apologies if you had any trouble trying to reach the site in recent days. I’ve been dealing with some technical issues. I’m still not sure they’re entirely resolved, but hopefully it should at least remain reachable for anyone reading.

I always wonder what the the technical support people from my hosting company make of this site. From the names of those involved, the first line support staff appear to mostly be women based in India. It must be a tough job to suddenly be dropped into a chat function with a strange guy called paltego who is wondering where his site full of dominant ladies, tied up men and sexually explicit imagery has vanished to.

Speaking of which, here’s a fun photograph of a tied man and a couple of happy looking dommes.

I’m afraid I’ve no idea where this is from. The text is Spanish for ‘Tied Love’ (according to the online translators), but I haven’t tracked down a site or photography studio. As always feel free to comment if you can help me attribute it.

Seasons Beatings

I’ll take a brief break from talking about the morality and ethics of kinky activities, to plug a kinky Christmas party. It’s in LA on the 15th, at the beautiful Chi Temple, and features a bevy of fabulous dommes. I sadly can’t be there, but I’ve played privately with a number of the dommes involved, and I know them to be very fun and talented individuals. Plus, check out this photo. Not only did they get together for the promo shot, they got festive hats and appropriately color coordinated outfits. Now that’s professionalism.

See this link for more details on the party.

The Two Kinkster Problem

I’ve finally got time to get back to my post from last week entitled ‘Pick a Side‘. That was all about the morals and ethics of certain kinky activities. Is it reasonable to cast some kinks as wrong or bad, while falling back on the argument of ‘as long as its consensual adults, its OK’  for other kinks?

I got some interesting comments, which prompted me to think more on the issue, and come up with a thought experiment. Let’s call it ‘The Two Kinster problem.’

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 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?

There’s obviously no incorrect answer. I’m just curious what answers or comments readers might have to the question.

When it comes to philosophical questions, I only know of one famous philosopher with a femdom connection  – Aristotle. I’ve covered the story of him and Phyllis previously. This particular image of them is by the French painter Étienne Jeaurat.

Intermission (continued)

Real life continues to get in the way of my blogging. It’s now 4am local time, and I really need to get to bed, but I also don’t like to leave it this long between posts. So I’m continuing the intermission concept with some more eye candy. This time it’s a beautiful piece of suspension bondage, shot by the photographer Weronika Bachleda. The rigger is Gestalta.

I found this via a tweet by Ruby Marks.

Intermission

I had intended to write some followup thoughts to yesterday’s post. Unfortunately, I ended up spending too long in the kitchen tonight. The chicken escabeche, roast potatoes and spicy arugula salad that resulted was well worth it, but I ran out of blogging time. I’ll therefore offer up this rather lovely artwork by way of an intermission. This is by the Spanish artist Anna Dart.

Update: Via a comment Ferns pointed out that this is actually based on a photograph of David and Victoria Beckham. Oddly enough, I  featured that original photograph in a post just over a year ago.

Pick a Side

Apologies if you’ve one of the tiny handful of people who follow me on twitter, as this post is going to be a rehash of a twitter rant I posted there recently. The tweets were an experiment to see if I could use twitter threads for thoughts longer than 280 characters, and if I’d get better engagement with them. The answers were respectively ‘not easily’ and ‘no’, so I think blog posts will remain my primary form of expression.

The rant in question was brought about by multiple social media arguments I’d seen on controversial kinky activities. Topics like race play, extreme age play, incest porn/roleplay and nazi outfits. All these arguments ultimately boiled down to two basic viewpoints. On one side was ‘as long as its consensual, adults can fantasize about anything’, on the other was ‘this activity has serious implications and you’re selfish/evil for treating it as way to get off’. I think both of those can be defensible opinions. What struck me as crazy was people flipping between the two depending how they felt about the topic in question.

The ‘as long as its consensual’ view is basically a get of jail free card. It’s a perspective that puts kinky play in its own little bubble, with no obvious relationship between what happens in the bubble and the outside world. If you believe it, then you can do a non-con sex roleplay, and not think you’re encouraging rape. Or beat someone and not spend any time wondering if you’re encouraging violence. That’s a valid viewpoint in my opinion, but it’s important to realize, it’s activity agnostic. You can’t logically claim your kinks live in a bubble where consent is all that matters, but arbitrary other kinks don’t.

On the other side, I think it’s also reasonable to argue that kinks very much interact with a broader social context. For example, one could discuss the intersection of race play and racism. However, if you’re going to do that, it means all kinks have to be considered in that context. That means a lot of kinks become potentially problematic, and require deeper analysis and justification. I typically don’t see anyone out there wanting to do that work for their personal favorite kinks.

In actuality, what consistently happens is that people play the ‘as long as its consensual’ card for their favorite kinks, and then try to withhold it when the activity in question gives them yucky feelings. Which seems broken to me. Either play the card consistently and let others do the same, or don’t play it at all.

In the femdom realm the combination of cross-dressing and humiliation is one of those controversial topics that can trigger a similar ‘consensual adults’ versus ‘this is wrong’ debate. The artwork here is by Voloh.