Erythrophilia

I’d always assumed that pretty much every human behavior was associated with a kink of some sort, along with a fancy sounding -philia label. After all, there are kinks for things like crying (dacryphilia), amputation (acrotomophilia) and noses (nasophilia). Yet apparently, there’s no official name for an attraction to blushing. At least I haven’t managed to find one after an extensive 10 minutes of Googling. The best I came up with was Erythrophilia – which is apparently an attraction to the color red. That amazes me, given that blushing is a sexual response, which would seem to make it prime fodder for kinking on. Embarrassment and humiliation are major kinks, and blushing is very closely associated with those emotions, yet there’s no official label? Maybe it’s too subtle an effect to get people hooked on?

What sent me down this wikipedia rabbit hole was the image below. It’s from The Smutty Rogue, features blushing and is sexy as hell. If you like it then you might want to check out more from his tumblr.

Changing of the Guard

The kink.com site has a new CEO. As covered in this Vice article, Alison Boden has replaced Peter Acworth. I’m happy to see a woman get the top job at a very high profile kinky porn producer and, an engineer myself, I’m particularly happy to see that she got there via a technology background. She started as a software engineer and was their VP of technology prior to the CEO job. It’s frequently the finance, marketing or product management people who get the fast track to the top job. Given the lack of female software engineers in general, and in top positions in particular, it’s great to see one heading a company like kink.com.

These images feature Lorilei Lee shooting for Kink’s Divine Bitches site.

Mounting Her Horse

As I’ve posted in the past, I get my fair share of odd emails. Today’s example might be weirdest yet. Apparently somebody thought this’d be a great site for someone to contribute an article on pulmonary hemorrhage’s in horses. I say it was ‘someone’, but I’m sure it was a very confused computer algorithm that was spamming me. In its defense I have written about horses, blood and breathplay, which do all kind of relate to the topic of bleeding in a horse’s lung. But probably not in a way that my spammers customers are looking for.

Of course in writing this post, I’m probably just going to encourage the algorithm to continue think I’m a horse related blog. Hopefully this ladies mount isn’t suffering from anything pulmonary or otherwise.

I found this on the mrunderheel twitter feed.

I want to feel you from the inside

Readers of my era may be amused and/or be depressed by this video of teens reacting to music from the 90’s. I personally enjoyed it, particularly their reaction to Closer by Nine Inch Nails. Anyone would think that they’d never heard an artist express the view that he’d like to fuck them like an animal. I particularly appreciated the guy who’d never heard of the band but liked the name for the supposed Freudian suggestion.

NiN is a very domme band. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard them played in sessions. At first I thought it was just because their style and lyrics fitted kinky play, but after hearing a lot of dommes talk about liking them and seeing them in concert, I think it must be more than that. Something about their energy, sound and aesthetics chimes with a disproportionate number of dommes.

This image of someone being felt from the inside, and possibly fucked like an animal, comes from the nsfw zhenya tumblr.

Cleaning Up

I did a pass today across the Femdom Image page and cleaned up all the links that were dead, taken over spammers or hadn’t been updated in many months. My thanks to a very helpful reader who emailed me a number of pointers to those issues on the page.

The next step is to add new and interesting image site links. So if anyone has non-commercial image sites they like and frequent (tumblr or otherwise) then please leave a comment or  email me. I’m particularly interested in ones that focus on male submission. They’re the trickiest ones to track down.

Nice

I like his hands in this image. Hers are the ones doing the grabbing, but his pose is the one that makes this kinky. It’s the vulnerable pose of do what you want, I surrender.

This image has been posted across a lot of different places, but I’m not exactly sure of the original source. I think it’s fan art from a manga series called Tokyo Ghoul.

Opt In or Opt Out

A couple of comments to my previous post got me thinking about the dynamics of session negotiation. Specifically, what gets treated as opt in and what as opt out. In theory, if you listen to most kinksters, all play has to be consensual and explicitly negotiated ahead of time, so everything should be opt in. The reality can be murkier.

The comments in question – from Servitor and Al about my pet peeve of ‘gotcha questions’ –  were slightly different but both raised the same basic point. I might not like questions designed to trip a submissive up, but that’s a valid thing to do for some scenes. Your kink is not my kink and all that. I absolutely agree with that. It can be a fine style of play if you’re into that dynamic or the roleplay requires it. But it’s also not quite the point I was trying (and probably failing) to make. Gotcha questions are a specific activity or style, and yet often get used without discussion. Which brings me to this posts title. My pet peeve isn’t so much with the approach itself, but that it is something I have to actively opt out of. Shouldn’t the default be opt in? Not so much YKINMKBYKIOK, but that YKINMK – and it’s in my session damn it! – BYKIOK.

I can think of other examples where the default is the reverse of what you might expect. Bondage for example. That’s part of almost every scene I do, yet I don’t think it ever gets negotiated. It’s treated as an intrinsic part of kink that you’d have to explicitly request not to do. Impact play is another. I’ve lost track of the number of times I didn’t mention impact play in session negotiation, yet 10 minutes later somebody was whaling on my ass. I suspect that’s probably because almost all domme’s like it so much! Neither of those activities count as a pet peeve for me, because I also enjoy them, but it might be an issue for someone else.

What exactly gets treated as opt in versus opt out clearly varies from domme to domme. At one extreme, every domme I know treats edge play activities like piercing, cutting or breathplay as opt in. They always get discusssed first. On the other side, along with bondage and impact play, I’ve typically found blindfolds and hoods are opt out. If I don’t call them out as an issue then there’s a good chance they’ll be pulled out at some point and I’ll have to start negotiating mid-scene, which is never my favorite time to do it. In between those two groups there’s a lot of fuzziness. For example, face slapping for some people is a very specific activity to be discussed ahead of time, for others its just an intrinsic part of kink that it’s up to the submissive to opt out of.

I’ve more to add here, but I’ll save that for the next post. In the meantime, I’ll continue my photographic theme of impact play. If this gentleman has a desire to opt out of caning, he probably needs to speak up asap.

This is from the High heels & Fetish tumblr.

Pet Peeve – Gotcha Questions

I think I’m due another PPPP – a Paltego Pet Peeve Post. Excuse me while I unburden myself on this one.

Today’s pet peeve is domme’s who ask questions with the deliberate goal of tripping the submissive up or drawing out a ‘wrong’ answer. There are a lot of ways to do this, but perhaps the canonical example would be posing a question and then, however the submissive responds, following up with “No. The right answer is whatever Mistress wants.” That really bugs me.

Let me first qualify that there is a specific style of play that this kind of gotcha questioning is appropriate for. If you’re doing a punishment or humiliation dynamic, where the whole point is that the submissive should always be wrong and kept mentally off balance, then its a valid technique. It’s certainly a mindfuck to be forced to answer knowing that there is no good response. But those kind of scenes are a specific and narrow style of play. I actually never do them, yet still encounter the gotcha question approach from time to time.

The reason I dislike it so much is that it runs directly counter to the goal of being open and honest in communication. I always want to be transparent and truthful with my thoughts and emotions in a scene. That’s the only way I know to build two way trust and a sense of connection. If I start having to second guess my answers, or spot the gotcha questions from the real ones, then it runs counter to that goal. Being told an honest answer is a wrong answer sets up bad incentives for my future answers, and forces my brain into social-interaction and negotiation mode, which is not at all conducive to subspace.

I’ve seen plenty of dommes complain over the years about submissives expecting them to be mind readers. They get told that the submissive will do anything to make them happy, and then get upset when it turns out that they were operating with different definitions of ‘anything’.  I think that’s a very reasonable response but, on the flip side, asking submissives ‘no win’ questions conditions them to give exactly these kind of responses. You can’t have it both ways.

Of course, just because a domme doesn’t deliberately trip up a submissive, doesn’t mean she can’t beat him. It’s always fair to say – “It’s interesting that you think that. Now bend over so I can cane that ass.”

I’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for this image. Please leave a comment if you can help me with that.

Updated: Thanks to a helpful comment I can attribute this to Princess Toni. Based on similar images, I think this might be a Cruella shot.

Yogi

These shots by Mistress An Li made me happy. Not because it’s a great bondage set-up, although it is that. Not because it looks like something I’d want to try, although it’s also that. Not even because Mistress An Li looks so pleased with her creation, although a smiling domme is one of my favorite scenes. No. It’s because I saw the first shot and went “Oooh, that looks like reclined bound angle pose.” And then I felt all unjustifiably smug and pleased with myself that – after 18 months of regular yoga – I’d finally been able to remember and recognize one pose. Admittedly, that might be because it’s got a kinky sounding name, but I don’t care. I’m officially upgrading myself from yoga idiot to yoga novice.

Mistress An Li is a LA based pro-domme. You can find her professional site here and here twitter feed here. She also has a short video shot from this scene tweeted here, with the full video available at her onlyfans site.