Tag: F

Strike a Pose

I took a vacation day off from my vacation today. After three days of being beaten and abused (in the best possible way) I relaxed and did touristy stuff. I did get to enjoy some instruction on wine from a very attractive sommelier wearing a short leather skirt and sporting a slash of dark red lipstick, but I’m going to consider that more a happy bonus than a part of my kinky trip.

The break also gave me chance to catch up on the world and write a post featuring the happy couple below. I generally steer clear of politics on this site. As much as I despise the current US administration, I don’t think readers comes here for my political opinions. However, the moment I saw the pictures below, I knew they’d end up as blog post. For anyone who missed the story, that’s Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin with his wife Louise Linton. She’d already made a lot of new friends via twitter spat earlier this year,  and this photograph was just her latest PR success story.

The reason I feature it here is because it reminds me of so many images I see on my twitter feed. There’s an attractive lady staring down into the camera, brandishing a stack of bills, and offering a look that mixes sexy, smug and condescension . It’s a fin-domme classic. Normally – on my twitter feed at least – it’s accompanied by comments about everyone being pathetic losers and the need to drain their wallets, but I think with these two that context goes without saying. Louise even accessorized correctly with the fetishistic black leather gloves and skirt. Given Mnuchin is worth a fortune, I doubt she’ll need to start a new career as an online financial domme. But if he’s the first up against the wall in a revolution, she’ll at least have career options to fall back on.

Stupid Tumblr (updated)

Many thanks to everyone who responded to my previous post. Clearly, when it comes to browsing porn, passions – quite rightly – run high.

As far as I can tell there are actually two independent factors at work here. One is an adult (safe mode) setting and one is a privacy setting. Some tumblrs (like mine) have neither set and can be easily viewed without logging in. Some (like Femdom Style Counsel) have the adult flag flipped, which means you have to be logged in, but they can still be viewed normally in a web browser once you are. Some (like alternative femdom) have the privacy setting flipped on, which means it is only viewed in your dashboard and you always get a crappy browsing experience.

I’m not really sure why anyone anonymously reposting random porn pictures to their anonymous tumblr would flip the privacy flag, but apparently that’s what is going on. The good news is that the iOS app makes for a slightly better experience for tumblrs tagged as private. The bad news is none of the suggestions I received fixed the web browser issues. So please, if you run an awesome femdom tumblr, don’t flip the privacy setting. It makes zero sense to do so and it’ll give a crappy experience to your viewers.

This is Cate Blanchett from an image found on the aforementioned Femdom Style Counsel tumblr.

Who are you? (Revisited)

So it turns out I’m a bad blogger who doesn’t carefully read the articles he links to. Yesterday’s post featured the story of a sex worker being outed by Facebook, and my suggestion that limiting different social media products to different online identities would probably help. It turns out that was exactly what Leila, the sex worker in question, had done. She only used Facebook in her private life, but still it started linking to her work social contact. My bad for not paying attention. I should probably be punished.

In my defense, I will say that it’s likely the information leakage occurred through the path I did actually identify in the post – smart phone or tablets linked with social media. It’s feasible to set-up a PC with distinct user accounts and strictly enforced separation of data and identities. It’s almost impossible to do that for other devices. And while you could obviously just use physically distinct devices for each online identity, the reason we have these devices is for convenience. Even if you carry two phones, at some point you’ll want to share data between them, and as soon as you do, there’s an opportunity for tech companies to sneak in and exploit it.

The fundamental problem here is that users are not the customers of social media – they’re the product. The advertisers are the customers. The more data the media companies have on their users/product the better they can target it for their customers. So their goal is not to solve these kind of issues. It’s to do the absolute minimum necessary to stop the product getting mad enough to quit, while retaining the maximum amount of information for their advertisers. As a tech guy I can understand that, but as a kinky sex blogger and social media user, it definitely sucks.

It’s an entirely solvable problem from a technology perspective, but the incentive structure for the companies isn’t in place to do so. That leaves people with multiple online identities with limited options. Either never use social media anywhere, or give up anonymity, or keep separate devices for each identity and be incredibly careful to never link or associate them in any way. Or, I guess, roll the dice and hope Facebook doesn’t pop up one of those annoying ‘Your friends liked…’ ads for your local kinky munch on your mom’s Facebook feed.

I’ve no idea what an appropriate image for this post would be, so I’ll continue the masquerade mask theme from yesterday. I’m afraid I have no idea what’s going on in this image, or who it’s originally by, but I would love to attend the kind of parties that featured masked topless ladies drinking wine and brandishing knives.

Who are you?

This Gizmodo story is likely to strike fear into the heart of anyone who tries to maintain multiple and distinct identities on social media. A sex worker named Leilia had two separate Facebook accounts, one for her private life and one for her job. Despite keeping them distinct, with separate email and phone numbers, her friends and family account suddenly started suggesting her work clients as “People You Might Know.” Obviously Facebook’s algorithms had managed to link the data in someway and decided it was all one big happy social network.

Facebook coming up with surprising and unnerving friend suggestions isn’t a new story. This article, posted a few months ago, describes how it figured out the authors great aunt, despite the fact his father had been adopted as child and had no contact with that branch of the family. With the algorithms getting smarter, the amount of data online constantly growing, and neither of them easy to monitor or understand, I’m sure issues like this are going proliferate.

As a software guy, I find the situation somewhat perverse. Traditionally academic computer systems had very strong notions of user identity, because they were shared systems, where personal computers had no concept of it, because they weren’t powerful enough to support it. Companies like Microsoft and Apple worked for years to bring proper identify management and user isolation to PCs. No sooner had they achieved that goal – Windows XP being a major milestone – than smart phones, tablets and social media software arrived and turned everything into a inter-connected soup with no good way to managed different identities.

For now I suspect the only way to handle the problem is to not use the same social media platform with two different identities you wish to keep distinct. So if you have a Facebook account for a friends/family identity, don’t have one for your kink/sex identity. And if you want a tumblr account to share kinky porn, don’t also create a second tumblr account to share holiday snaps with friends. Pick the product most useful to each identity and don’t assume you can keep two accounts on the same platform distinct.

Life was so much simpler before the internet. It used to be only necessary to slip on a masquerade mask and you could attend any fancy ball of your choice in total anonymity.

This is from a shoot for Marie Claire by Koray Parlak and features Nina Reijnders with Victoria Lipatova.

The sexual power of the penetrating tool

While researching yesterday’s post featuring Mistress Yin, I came across this article by her on the pleasure she takes from anal sex as a top. I think it’s a great piece, and it really captures the aspects of anal play that make it so appealing to her.

I remember chatting to a domme about top space and the various ways she could access it. I was somewhat surprised to learn that she found that wielding a strap-on was one of the most consistent routes in to it. I’d always assumed top space would be tied to more obvious controlling and sadistic activities like bondage, corporal, piercing, etc. Yet for her it was the very intimate level of control and physical manipulation that came from a strap-on that worked most effectively.

This obviously isn’t Mistress Yin. I believe, based on this tweet, it’s Tristan Taormino.

Mercy Mistress

If you’re a fan of femdom (that should be almost everyone) and independent visual arts (hopefully a non-trivia subset of the former group), then allow me to direct your attention to Mercy Mistress. It’s a new series being developed by Mistress Yin and, as she describes in this slutist article…

I want to make a webseries about kink, BDSM, the sex industry, Asian American-ness, queerdom, and good food.
…
Mercy Mistress is a fictional show based on my career as a professional dominatrix in New York City. Each episode focuses on a particular client, their kink, and their slice of life: Where their proclivities developed from and how they balance (or don’t balance) with their “vanilla” reality. From the nucleus of one woman’s work, the show delves into all the colors and shades of sexuality.

If you want to help her to develop the series then there’s a Chuffed campaign running for donations.

This is Poppy Liu playing Mistress Yin.

A cunning plan

Trying to dig up dirt dirt on your political opponents is a time honored trick. Liberal Democrat candidate Dean Stone seemed to be giving it a shot when he emailed his opponent to ask if she had ‘anything embarrassing’ in her past. Admittedly, simply asking your opponent to simply volunteer political ammunition is pretty dumb, but at least it follows the basic formula. However, he then decided to give the old storyline a new twist, by sending her a naked picture of himself, partly dressed as a mouse and with a dominatrix. Presumably he thought she might not have been clear what he meant by ’embarrassing’, and thought that a personal example might really clarify his original request.

In today’s climate, it’s tough to set new standards for dumb political decisions. I really thought America had this sewn up. Yet Mr Stone has made a strong play here to bring Britain back into contention. Sadly, despite his cunning plan, he ended up coming 6th out of 6 candidates, so clearly the British voters aren’t on board with this new approach. Maybe he should try giving the White House a call? They seem to like out-of-the-box thinkers who can do exciting new things with social media.

Of course if Servitor had his way, male politicians and voters would be a thing of the past.

AWOL

Apologies in advance – I’m off to the wilds of Oregon for the weekend, so there’ll be no new posts until I’m back. I normally wouldn’t be caught dead anywhere without internet access, but I have family in town, and they wanted to see a bit more of the US than was visible from my usual haunts of urban cocktail bars and restaurants.

If anyone is looking for some alternative entertainment while I’m gone, I noticed that Midori had done a couple of podcasts on her Forte Femme course. You can listen to part 1 and part 2 here. If I’m honest I found the interviewer a little annoying, as everything was awesome and amazing. I’d personally have preferred a more investigative and inquisitive approach, but your mileage may vary.

Hopefully I’ll be back on Sunday with new posts. That is unless I’m captured and ravaged by a wild roaming dominatrix, as captured in this rare photograph. I know what to do when encountering a bear or a cougar in the wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, but what about a domme of the forest? Based on my knowledge of the urban domme, I’m guessing the answer is probably a cock shot of some sort. That’s probably better than bear spray when it comes to ensuring everyone stays a long way away from you.

This is from the lovely Goddess Jessica’s twitter feed.

Quite the Collection

I’ve played in hotel rooms a good number of times, and generally had a fun experience. With the right dynamic and a bit of ingenuity you can do all sorts of scenes with a small travel bag of toys. And, as I’ve posted before, playing in a more downmarket location can sometimes have thrills all of its own.

Mistress Chiaki is clearly not a subscriber to that particular approach, given this shot of what looks like a beautiful hotel room and a truly awesome collection of toys. I’ve seen professional dungeons with less equipment than that. I hope she has a retinue of beefy slaves to pack it all up and carry it around for her.

This is from her blog in a post back in April this year.

The safeword is ‘lawyer’

Via the Detroit News comes this story of a domme called Temptress Nirvana facing prison time for blackmail. It’s hard to tell if this was a fin domme scene gone very badly wrong, a straight out extortion attempt or something in-between. The article seems to rely almost entirely on the police report, which is certainly damming, but hardly a trustworthy and unbiased source. The domme’s twitter feed looks like a lot of similar ones from other fin dommes. i.e. Lots of selfies, suggestions to send money and reports of cash gifts.

Whatever the details of this particular case, I can’t help thinking that this might be the kind of thing we see a lot more of in coming years. For one, it typically seems to involve horny older men with a humiliation and blackmail fetish talking to young and attractive but inexperienced women who want money. That seems like a combination primed for disaster. I’m sure there are some highly skilled and trustworth fin dommes out there but, like every area in life, the bad always outnumber the good.

The other things that makes me think this’ll be a repeating storyline is changing demographics. Fetishes are said to develop when people are children or adolescents. Most of today’s middle-aged men with money and blackmail fetishes will not have grown up with the internet. The generation that follows them will have. They’ll have experienced formative events involving social media, and I have to think that’ll play into what kinks are popular in the years to come. If doing online blackmail scenes becomes increasingly popular, then it’s inevitable there will be more spinning out control and ending up in court.

From a personal perspective, I don’t need help from someone like Temptress Nirvana to spend my money. Most of it has a very brief and passing relationship with my bank account at the best of times.

This is from the twitter feed of the domme in question.