Idiocy on idiocy

After writing yesterday’s post on the stupid British porn laws, I spotted this page by Megara Furie on the issue of minors accessing content. Apparently the issue is that the widely used Clips 4 Sale site accepts debit cards. Credit cards require proof of age, but anyone can get a prepaid debit card. That effectively means that no UK producer can use the number one clips site in the world. There are alternatives (for example Clips Fatale), but I suspect the other sites don’t see anywhere near the same volume of traffic.

I can see this is clearly a major problem. I’m sure that many minors are saving up their pocket money in order to sneakily acquire debit cards and then pay for pornography. There’s absolutely no way they’d be going off to the completely free and anonymous sites like redtube or xvideos or pornhub. Minors are also notoriously bad and nervous about using modern technology, so there’s no chance there’d be getting porn from one of the zillions of illegal but free torrent sites out there.

Quite frankly if anyone did find a minor paying for porn he (or she) should get an award for their honesty (after taking the porn away). I can only hope the idiots at ATVOD organization never stumble across any of the more potent Japanese femdom material. It might melt their tiny little brains. There’s all sorts of extreme whipping, breathplay and toilet scenes. None of which is now allowed in Britain. The image below is from the Rinryu site which (fair warning) containing heavy material featuring all three of those activities.

Japanese Femdom

One last tease

I though I was done with the tease and denial posts, but having stumbled onto this image I couldn’t help but feature it. A contortionist domme is an unusual but appealing concept. I didn’t recognize the characters but Google tells me this is fan art of Ty Lee from The Last Airbender. According to wikipedia she’s an acrobat who can paralyze people by striking their pressure points. It looks like she’s found a pressure point in a particularly critical spot.

Ty Lee from The Last Airbender by Third HorsemanI believe the artist of this works under the handle Third Horseman.

T & D

While I was slacking off in Vegas this past weekend it struck me that it was the ultimate tease and denial town. It dangles the idea of winning lots of money, but rarely follows through. It promises celebrity chefs running restaurants, when in reality all the chefs are off at their main spots in NYC, London, Paris or wherever. Clubs and bars are advertised on the basis of decadent and hedonistic delights, when they’re really just loud crowded rooms full of tourists. When it comes to sexual delights, stripping is the main industry, and that’s the ultimate in tease and denial. Lots of lithe flesh, and naked girls on laps, but no touching or any kind of sexual contact. For those into promised but undelivered pleasure it must be the ideal vacation spot.

I sound like I’m down on it, but I’m really not. I like visiting. I’m just way past the age where gambling, strip clubs and lining up for the latest hot club has any appeal. I like sitting in on a patio with a cocktail, catching up with friends and people watching. I used to think it was the place to go for no holds barred hedonism. Now I think of it as the blue balls capitol of the world.

Guy Tickling by AleX00XelAThis teasing image is called Guy Tickling and is by AleX00XelA.

Kink on Netflix

I’ve mentioned the James Franco documentary on kink.com in previous posts here. I’ve yet to see it, but that may be about to change. I just noticed it has been made available on Netflix’s streaming service. Not sure if what regions it’s available in, but I can certainly see it listed in the US. May be worth a look if you’re at all curious about one of the larger companies in the BDSM porn scene.

The image below is from the kink site TS Seduction and features the beautiful Yasmin Lee.

Yasmin Lee from Kink.Com

KinkBNB

You may have heard of Airbnb, the service that facilities property rentals between private individuals. Well now there is KinkBNB, a service that lets you rent other kinksters play spaces. Renting a play space obviously isn’t a new idea, but I’m not aware of any service for coordinating the process. Typically you’d need to hunt around different pro-domme sites and forums to see what was available. It seems to be mostly Californian spaces at present, but if the concept takes off, maybe there’ll soon be spaces soon available in every town.

Of course while well equipped play spaces can be fun, you don’t actually need one to get kinky. This couple seem to be having a good time in what looks like a hotel room. Or at least one of them is having a good time. It’s a little hard to ascertain the attitude of the other one.

HotelRoom

Fetlife Fail

Fetlife has been in the news recently for all the wrong reasons. Somebody scraped a bunch of user data off it and published it on the open web. This wasn’t a hack. They simply created a normal free account, which just takes a few seconds, and then ran a script to browse the site and download user profiles accessible to all fetlife users. They claimed that this was to demonstrate the lack of security in Fetlife. That position was undermined somewhat by the fact that they only took data from female users under 30 years old and published it in a file called ‘The Fetlife Meatlist’.

Understandably this pissed a lot of people off leading to articles like this and this. While the person who did it is obviously an asshole, I can’t say I was particularly surprised. There have been numerous articles over the years highlighting this potential attack, as well as previous technical demonstrations of the approach. Of course that doesn’t much help the 99% of Fetlife users who are busy getting kinky rather than reading techy sex blog articles.

It’s tempting to say that you should expect anything published online to be public. That’s both true and missing the point. Privacy is not a binary concept. At one extreme you have things like password protected accounts for storing private cellphone photographs. At the other you have sites like reddit and blogs like this one. To access the former you need either a hacker or a security flaw in the storage system. To access the latter you just need a web browser and an internet connection. Neither provides guaranteed privacy, as a lot of celebrities recently found out. Yet expectations of the two are clearly different.

Social media sites like Fetlife and Facebook fall someone between those two extremes. The problem is that their business model of eyeballs and advertisers pulls them towards the openness of a reddit or a blog. The expectation of their users, particularly for a content sensitive site like Fetlife, pulls towards greater privacy and protection. To date it seems that Fetlife has biased towards its advertisers over its users. So yes, you should always work on the assumption that anything stored online may become public. But that doesn’t absolve Fetlife of the responsibility to strike the right balance between its business model and its users privacy.

In the meantime, if you do take kinky selfies, be careful how you share them. Although if anyone wants to send me some, I promise to be careful with them!

'Selfie' by Gracy GimpThis is by the Belgium artist Benoit Feroumont, who posts his erotic work under the handle Gracy Gimp.

Knot too kinky

It’s possible probable I’ve been spending too much time lurking on kinky sites. During my coffee break browsing today I stumbled on this article on useful knots, and was shocked that bondage wasn’t featured front and centre. I think I read through all 200+ comments looking for mentions of kink, and only spotted a couple. The fact I found the lack of kinky comments weird is perhaps a sign I should get out more. Maybe do some fishing, camping, climbing and sailing and use knots as God intended.

For those perverts out there like myself who have trouble picturing family friendly uses for a knot, this article on Rope Bondage 101 might be more interesting. It’s got a lot of great advice on materials, techniques, safety and of course knots.

Rope Bondage by David Lawrence
There are various cropped version of this image floating around on tumblr (where I found it originally). A bit of detective work led me to the original by the photographer David Lawrence. This is from his series Vertis.

Pick a number

It’s not femdom related, but I found this article on estimating the percentages of LGB people an interesting one. In most important ways the actual number is irrelevant. It’s clearly millions of people, so I’m not sure why different groups get so riled up over the exact count. It’s the historical and scientific perspective that I find interesting. One thing that comes through clearly from the article is the difficulty in giving a binary answer to what’s not a binary situation. There’s also clearly shifts in the numbers that reflect both changes in public identification and changes in actual behavior.

The precision of the wording in these kind of surveys always makes me smile. In this case I particularly liked the phrase – “someone with whom you have had any genital contact intended to achieve orgasm”. That’s a smooth line to use in a bar – “Fancy coming back to my place? I’ve got a box of Franzia in the fridge and a smooth jazz CD in the stereo. Maybe we could have some genital contact with the intention of achieving orgasm?”

I wonder if there was a line in the survey that would fit these two ladies? I’m not sure about genital contact or the intention to achieve orgasm, but there’s definitely something pretty kinky going on.

TwoOnHorseI believe the artist is Chéri Hérouard aka herric.

Why wasn’t I told?

I’ve just discovered that Sardax has both a twitter account and a blog. As you’d expect, both contain many interesting images and thoughts. I’m stunned I’ve only just discovered them. Clearly I’ve been failing in my duty as a resource for all fine things femdom.

A refresh of my links and resources pages is obviously in order. I’ve been debating putting together a set of twitter links, and this suggests such a list is overdue. While I ponder the right way to handle that, I’ll leave you with an image from Sardax’s blog of Mistress Lucy Khan. I played with Mistress Lucy only a few weeks ago, so this seems a fitting piece of artwork to feature here.

Mistress Lucy Khan by Sardax

Getting a good buzz going

Masochists come in all shapes and sizes. For example, I give you Dr Schmidt, inventor of the Schmidt Sting Pain Index which rates certain insects (hymenoptera) by the degree of pain their sting produces. Admittedly he’s an entomologist who studies these insects in the field, so getting stung is part of the job description. I also wouldn’t say that inventing a pain scale automatically makes you a masochist. If you’re a thoughtful scientist who gets stung that seems like a logical thing to do. I think the giveaway is the descriptions he gives the stings.

A Yellowjacket sting is apparently – “Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.” In contrast the Sweet Bee is – “Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. As if a tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.” Nobody can wrote those kind of descriptions without some appreciation for the pleasures of pain.

'Eaten Alive' by XRendererThe above image is by the artist XRenderer. From the pot she’s holding I’m guessing these are supposed to be honey bees. According to Dr Schmidt they feel “like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.” I can’t imagine that can be too pleasant on a scrotum. Unless you like that kind of thing of course.