Tag: Artwork

Lies, Damned Lies and Sex Trafficking Crackdowns

When the US government was passing SESTA/FOSTA and shutting down backpage, sex workers were very vocal in claiming it would do nothing to stop sex trafficking and would actually make it harder to track. Now thanks to this article on newly discovered government memos, we can see how right those sex workers were. Backpage was apparently incredibly helpful in tracking dubious advertisements and alerting authorities when they thought children might be being trafficked. They allowed users to report ads, flagged photographs of anyone looking underage, worked with authorities on best practices and suggested filtering based on phone numbers that law enforcement could provide.

None of this stopped prosecutors spinning horror stories in the press about backpage, because of course the attack on backpage and sex workers (by proxy) was never about stopping trafficking. It was all about the look of the thing, scoring cheap political points and imposing control over what women can and cannot do with their bodies. The end result has been exactly what sex workers said would happen. Rather than working with a site with established expertise to solve the problem, the authorities have spent a fortune prosecuting them while losing any visibility they had into genuine exploitation.

I had no idea what an appropriate image for this post would be, so I’ll settle for a drawing showing exactly what I’d like to happen to every prosecutor involved in this fiasco. The artwork is by Annmo Night. 

My Bad

Apologies for the lack of posts recently. This might have been the longest I’ve ever gone without a post. I was staying with friends in a fancy Scottish manor house. It had relaxing couches and people who’d supply snacks and a bottle of scotch at any hour of the day. That is great for happy, drunken social time, but bad for my liver and writing blog posts.

Being back in London hasn’t been much better so far, but hopefully normal service should be resumed soon. Until then I’ll leave you with this image from a tweet by maid marta. The artist is identified as Caregan. As someone who has spent a fair amount of time recently dealing with travel security, this has a particular appeal. Sadly, none of my interactions have been quite this exciting.

Ending a Relationship

Autostraddle has an article on a topic that is very rarely covered in kink – The Unique Grief of Ending a BDSM Relationship. There are plenty of articles on starting BDSM relationships, and a far great number on actual kinky play within them, but very few cover the complexity and emotions in an ending. It’s written by a female dominant, but is less about the specifics of femdom and more about the dynamics that might affect the end of any kinky relationship. Not exactly sexy fun stuff, but interesting and well written.

This image is by Dirk Hooper and was created for Mistress Adreena. According to the original tweet it represents a happy memory from a session. I thought it was touching and sweet, but the emotion it captures also make it work in the context of this post. You can see more from Dirk Hooper at his site here.

Giving Tumblr a Good Screwing

Yahoo brought Tumblr for $1.1B in 2013. A few days ago it was sold for (allegedly) $3M. In between those times they managed to destroy a huge number of communities and alienate a major chunk of their users by banning adult content. Now I’m sure that enormous loss wasn’t purely due to the adult content ban – Yahoo were already writing the acquisition value down long before that – but you have to admit that it’s an impressive sequence of decision making. Less talented people might have settled for just losing money, or just pissing off their users, but it takes major skills to do both. For anyone worried about the impact on the executives involved in all this, fear not, they’re all still immensely wealthy multi-millionaires with well paid jobs. I’m sure that’ll be comforting for anyone whose site was trashed by the Tumblr rules changes.

I’ve no idea what image would best accompany this mini-rant, so I’ll pick something very hot and sexy from a Twitter user who is still advertising his Tumblr link. This is from a tweet by The Smutty Rogue. Apparently Nina is doing to Issac what Yahoo did to Tumblr.

 

Speaking Up (Continued)

This is a continuation of yesterday’s post on the challenge for submissives to speak up while playing. I’m certainly no expert, but I thought I’d share a couple of pieces of advice I’ve found useful.

Firstly, don’t assume that just because you’re doing a familiar activity, with someone you’ve played with before, you won’t need to speak up. Mental and physical states are always changing. I was caught out in this way one time while being single tailed by Mistress Mara Mayhem in Chicago. We’d played together several before and this certainly wasn’t a new activity for me. Unfortunately on the way to her space, my uber driver’s radio had been describing the gruesome details of the killing of Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi government. It was a disturbing story and for some reason, as we were playing, I couldn’t get it out of my head. My thoughts were racing and I began to feel faint. It seemed stupid. The physical sensations weren’t that intense and my position wasn’t uncomfortable. Yet somehow the combination of the session stress and my messed up thoughts almost pushed me into passing out. Luckily Mistress Mara is an expert and picked up something was going on, giving me a cue to communicate and temporarily stop the scene. I was relying on my history of play to guide me, rather than listening to what my body was telling me at that moment.

The other piece of advice I’d give to submissives is to try and be transparent and informational with your communication, rather than directive. The submissive’s role isn’t to control scene, but to give the domme the information she needs to make the scene work. For example, consider the situation of being put into an uncomfortable bondage position that you’re not sure about. Can you tolerate it? You might not want to immediately say you can’t handle it, but you also don’t want to wait until all the ropes in place and then have to stop everything. Giving informative but neutral feedback like “I can handle this, but probably not for a long period” can help the domme adjust if necessary. Maybe a short period is all she was aiming for. Maybe she’ll dig for more details so she can tweak the position.

Being transparent in feedback doesn’t have to involve words. I always try and make the volume of my cries and moans reflect the intensity of the sensation I feel. If you grit your teeth right up until you’re forced to yell ‘Red!’ then you’ve given the domme nothing to work with and then a command to stop. Giving honest feedback via my yelps helps her fine tune the scene while keeping a natural D/s flow.

Here’s an example of clear communication in the other direction from Yumine Guo. I don’t think the domme has left much doubt about her opinions.

Tender Moment

Here’s something tender and sweet to start the week. Not sure of the original source, although I suspect Japanese fan art of some kind.

I do actually have a bunch of longer posts written in my head, but I’m lacking the time to do the small but important part where thoughts get translated into keyboard impressions. Part of that time crunch is because I’m organizing a trip back to the old country, and trying to solve for all necessary planning constraints there is breaking my brain. I need to visit friends in London, spend time with family in the Midlands, attend a birthday event in Scotland and in the middle of all that, jam as much kinky play in as I think I can get away with. Some creative storytelling might be necessary in order for me to sneak away for a beating or three. It’s all a lot easier on the West coast when my relatives are 5,000 miles away.

Replacing Max

One of the oldest discussion forums for femdom, and particularly professional femdom, has been The Hang at Max Fisch. Sadly, these days it seems somewhat neglected and forlorn. Whoever owns it has pretty much left it to rot, and while it still kind of works on a good day, the load times are long, the moderation AWOL and the support pretty much non-existent.

Anyone looking for a working alternative that doesn’t actually look all that different might want to check out The Buzz at domina.ms. They’re using what looks like exactly the same forum software with many of the same forums, but running on decent hardware and with proper moderation and support. It’s not as busy as Max used to be, but as The Hang continues to decline, I’d expect and hope it’d pick up more participants. I just created my account there.

If anyone has any other suggestions for active and well managed femdom forums, then feel free to leave me a comment and I’ll take a look and potentially link to them. Running this site takes up most of my kinky writing energy, so I don’t tend to do a lot of forum participation, but I do enjoy browsing them and linking to interesting posts I find.

One of the more frequent domme posters on The Buzz is Mistress Ayn (594 posts according to her profile). She’s shown here in a beautiful recent portrait by the inimitable Sardax. If you’d like to see her in person, she’s based in Atlanta.

Friendly

There has been a bunch of debate on social media recently about how open to kink Pride events should be. One side maintains that kink should be kept indoors and making Pride family friendly is important. The other side says that kink has always been an important part of Pride, and we shouldn’t be embracing corporate sponsors and mainstream coverage at the expense of slicing up the community.

You can probably guess where I stand on the issue. It seems pretty messed up to have huge corporations like AT&T sponsoring events while at the same time telling some segments of the LBGTQ community they’re not welcome. Young children will think all the costumes are fun and older children will be more aware of and switched onto the issues than their parents. The only people who’ll be offended are the same people who say “I don’t mind what people do, as long as they keep it private.” In other words, their standards should be the community standards and everyone else should fit into their world view. Fuck those people.

Of course, the irony here is that I hate crowds, marching and doing anything before midday. So while I’ll make it to the latter parts of Seattle pride to applaud and cheer, I’ll not be in the parade and certainly not be dressed in anything outrageous. If I was going to take a kinky outfit public, this cartoon definitely represents my preferred option. After all, everyone likes a friendly dog.

This is from The Perry Bible Fellowship (original is here).

Thought Experiment

After yesterday’s post on the catfishing kink a thought struck me – I could be a consensual fake fin-domme. I know kink. I know what buttons to push for submissive guys. I know how to write and steal hot photos from real dommes. That’s pretty much the job description for running this blog. I already get idiotic comments asking me to hook people up with some of the models I feature. I’d just need to fake the responses for that.

I should add at this point that my thought definitely wasn’t of the ‘OMG! What a brilliant idea’ variety. It was very much in the abstract. A realization of a possibility that I’d previously never known existed, but still had zero probability of being taken. However, I will say that this thought experiment did give me a whole new appreciation for women, and particularly women sex workers, on the internet. Because the idea of those interactions and the type of emails I’d receive filled me with horror. Imagine the energy I’d need to put into making it work. Imagine what opening my inbox would reveal. Imagine being on the receiving end of random bursts of male sexual energy from anyone connected to the internet. Jesus.

I’ve written often enough in the past about my respect for dommes online, but it was always a respect born from an intellectual understanding of what they have to put up with. It wasn’t until I imagined myself as a fake fin-domme that I had a visceral and gut reaction to what those interactions might entail. I’d never have the strength or skills to be a sex worker. Thank God there are people who can do it.

June 2nd was International Sex Worker Rights Day. The symbol for that is the red umbrella, and the dress in this image reminded me of that. Sex workers – possibly along with chefs and vintners – have brought more joy to my life than anyone else. So my eternal thanks to all of them.