Tag: F

Sade

Anyone interested in the history of BDSM and located near Barcelona may want to check out a new exhibition at the CCCB – Sade: Freedom or Evil.  As the name suggests it’s about the Marquis De Sade, the eponymous root of sadism. For those not in the area there’s a good review of it in the Guardian.

The exhibition features not just his work but also modern artists, including Maplethorpe, Dali and Susan Meiselas photographs of Pandora’s Box. It all sounds very interesting, which is more than I can say for Sade’s actual writing. That always struck me as repetitive and frequently nauseating. I can appreciate extreme kinky fiction, but there’s a level or brutality in his writing that verges more on serial killer fiction than erotica.

I’ll finish with a photograph of a very different type of Sade. This is Ms Sade, who used to work as a pro-domme in NYC. It’s one of my lasting regrets that I never got to play with her before she retired. She was quite the artist herself.

Meta Muppets

I’m always amazed when I spot a sex worker or erotic content creator with an Instagram account. It has to be the least sex friendly social media site around. My feeds are frequently full of sex workers complaining about their accounts being killed with little to no warning. Recently they even had a burst of banning general sex positive accounts, that weren’t explicit or sex work related. Some of these got reversed, but I wouldn’t bet against future waves of similar bans. If you are using Instagram for anything adult related, it’s best to treat it as a throwaway that might be lost at anytime.

Mistress Estelle Leon is another recent casualty of the capricious Instagram algorithm. How stupid does a platform have to be to deliberately ban beautiful images like this one?

Mistress Estelle is a Melbourne based pro-domme. She may have lost her Instagram account, but you can still follow here on Twitter and visit her professional site here.

Ooh, Shiny!

A particularly fetishistic shot for today’s post. I don’t feature a lot of images like this one, but I do love the textures and composition of this example. It’s also a rare case where a collar on a domme doesn’t look at all out of place. It seems to be very much part of the outfit, rather than a random BDSM accessory.

I believe this is Master Trinity, a Miami based pro-domme with a particular love of latex. You can find her primary professional site here, Twitter here and OnlyFans here.

Celebrity Indulgence

You’ll have to excuse this post. I’m going to be e a little self-indulgent and feature a celebrity crush. Specifically, Padma Lakshmi, who just announced she was leaving Top Chef. I’m a fan of the show and a fan of Padma. She’s smart, empathetic, loves food and looks amazing while sporting some killer outfits. What’s not to love?

If you like food shows, then I’d suggest checking out her Taste the Nation series. I’ll miss her telling chefs to pack their knives and go, but it’s a fine show in its own right.

This is Top Chef shot of Padma sourced from a Bravo TV Slideshow.

Final AI Thought

This is a third and final post (for now) on the AI topic. I’m bullish on the possibilities – more so than some commenters – because it seems to be entering one of those positive spirals that happens occasionally with tech. A tipping point is reached and what was only interesting to specialists becomes usable and consumable in the mainstream. That triggers interest, publicity and funding. That drives rapid improvement, which opens up more markets, which triggers more revenue streams, etc. etc.

The same kind of thing happened with 3D graphics in the 90s. Until then it had been kind of a niche technology. Readers of my generation may remember playing things like Battlezone or Elite. They seemed amazing at the time, but were never going to be a mainstream consumer product. Then in the mid 90’s the tech reached a quality tipping point and consumer interest in it exploded. The resulting positive spiral took it mainstream, made billions of dollars for the companies involved and ultimately led to the powerful computing clusters that are now driving AI.

Of course, there are also plenty of cases where we hit a tipping point, but that positive spiral never quite takes off. VR is another spin off from the graphical revolution, but despite a lot of money and hype from the likes of Meta and Apple, it never seems to quite get the feedback loop going. Hard to know which pattern AI will follow right now. The only thing that is predictable is that people will be making porn with it.

Above is an AI image created with midjourney by Helena Manzanita. It’s part of a series using the same seed through different points in time. You can see the complete series in this twitter thread.

More on AI

There’s one type of AI image that seems particular common – older women with enormous flawless breasts. I’d guess it’s a single person with a very specific kink churning them out, but maybe there’s a whole art collective involved. I would say it’s one for Dr. Freud, but even he might think it’s a little too on the nose.

The image below – with a caption added by Tom Allen – is an example of what I mean. You can find other examples on his twitter here and here.

Tom left a comment on my previous post that made an excellent point: AI imagery is likely to be a great source for caption creators. It avoids the issues of copyright and unwanted repurposing while giving a lot more control to the caption writer. Right now the image prompt writers and caption writers are likely different people. But once the tools get mature and widespread I can image a lot of new content from people writing image prompts for the particular scene they want to then caption.

You can see more captions from Tom on his tumblr and twitter.

A Kinky Advantage

AI generated images are showing up with increasing frequency in my media feeds. They still have a slightly fake soulless feel to them, as if they were created by ad agencies for marketing campaigns, but the quality has undeniably taken a big jump forward. For example, this thread has some interesting examples of how it can simulate different camera lenses.

This inevitably means people are going to try to create pornography with it. Which, equally inevitably, is going to lead to an evolving battle with the tech companies and government over what’s allowed and what gets censored. It’s a cycle that has played out with every technical evolution since the dawn of time.

Fortunately, kink might actually have an advantage here, because our take on what constitutes erotic material tends to be a lot wider than most peoples. For example, consider the image below. I doubt an image classifier would ever tag it as pornography but I’m betting a significant fraction of my readers will find it very erotic. I predict that a lot of kinky creative types are going to have fun creating non-explicit imagery that pushes their own personal buttons. The results might not be great art, but AI will probably do a better job than amateurs with basic photoshop tools.

Unfortunately I don’t have a source for this. Guessing it’s a mainstream fashion shot that I stumbled on via a femdom tumblr.

Summertime

My last couple of posts have been a little grouchy, so here’s a happy one full of color and summertime sun, courtesy of a tweet by Lady Lola. I’m always a fan of the classic black leather look (which Lady Lola also wears magnificently), but it makes a nice change to see a domme leave those outfits in the wardrobe and dress in something so colorful and beautiful.

Lady Lola is a London based pro-domme. You can find her professional site here and her twitter feed here.

No Basis for a System of Government

I have little love for the British royal family or the current Conservative government. However, I have to give a shout out to its member Penny Mordaunt for pulling off this look during the recent coronation. She’s not exactly the Lady of the Lake, but as sword wielding maidens go, she’s doing a fine job.

Apparently she sported the sword for 51 minutes which turns out to be quite a feat.  I’d never vote for her, but if any dragons show up and need slaying she might be just the woman for the job.