Making the internet a tiny bit smarter

I got my first really stupid comment the other day. Given this blog is now over 7 years, that’s surprising. Getting it also made me happy. That’s probably even more surprising.

When I say it was my first, that’s not to say I haven’t had other types of bad comments. My comment spam filter is called into action many times a day. I’ve also had a fair number of silly comments, with guys wanting me to dominate them, or set them up with women in the post photographs, or sell some random bit of equipment they no longer wanted. However, this was my first stupid troll like comment arguing that all kinksters were sick, abused as children, mentally damaged and should all be in therapy.

What made me happy was that it was the work of but a second to delete it from my moderation queue. Some guy had taken a bunch of time to write a lengthy screed, and with the flick of finger it was gone. He could have spent that same time polluting youtube comments, cluttering up a forum site with idiotic posts or sending nasty emails to sex workers. So in some very small way, my swift redirection of his time and effort into the void, made the internet just a little bit smarter.

Of course, we all take happiness where we can find it. In this ladies case, it seems to feature combining her first with his bottom. Quite literally two thumbs up.

I found this somewhere on tumblr. I’m afraid I don’t have an original source. If anyone can help me attribute it, please leave a comment. And if anyone knows the guy involved, please suggest that he should remove his socks before posing for a fisting photograph.

More bad news from D.C.

This report – US internet firms drop opposition and back bill to fight online sex trafficking – sounds like very bad news for sex workers of all types. On the face of it, with no additional context, it appears to have a laudable aim. After all, who could be in favor of sex trafficking? The problem is that government and law enforcement aren’t good at distinguishing between consensual and non-consensual sex work. And that’s putting the best possible spin on it. A more realistic view would be that they deliberately obfuscate regular sex work with sex trafficking.

The problem for the morality police (literal and figurative) is that sex work is a complex issue for many people. There are a lot of shades of grey and not a big majority for interfering with what consensual adults do in their own time. In contrast, attacking sex trafficking – which is by definition non-consensual – is always going to get a lot of support. So claim that all sex work is inherently trafficking and bingo, instant leverage to impose your morality regardless of reality.

The bill amends the Communications Decency Act to remove protection for online service providers if third parties us them to assist, facilitate or support sex trafficking. You don’t have to be Cassandra to see the chilling effect that might have. Given the tendency of law enforcement to define sex trafficking in the broadest possible terms, and given tech firms tendency to want to avoid any kind of sex related controversy, the pressure will be to remove any and all sex work related content. After all, how is Google to know that the pro-domme whose website they’re linking to hasn’t been trafficked? Or what about that pro-dommes web hosting company? Or how about the sites sex workers advertise on (e.g. Slixa or Eros)? It only needs one case that law enforcement can distort into a trafficking scenario and suddenly they’ll be potentially liable.

As you’d expect the Sex Workers Outreach Project is against it as is the Electronic Frontier Foundation.  If you’re a US citizen I’d encourage you to either contact your state representative about the bill or donate to organizations like SWOP or EFF to fight it.

I’ve no idea what image is appropriate for a piece like this, so I’ll leave you with a shot of a woman doing to a man what politicians do to the electorate. The difference being, he’s actually enjoying it.

This is by the artist Sheggy.

Slutty Witch

It’s Halloween in the US, which means only one thing in the paltego household. I’m curled up with a bottle of red wine, safe in the knowledge that there’s a condo concierge, a key locked elevator and a thick door between me and the hordes of ravenous tiny people roaming the streets for candy. Nobody can accuse me of not getting into the festival spirit – namely because I steer clear of everyone on these kind of occasions. I am the E. Scrooge of Halloween, minus the annoying ghosts and the last minute change of heart.

The other thing Halloween means is lots of shots on twitter of professional kinksters wearing fetish gear to parties. That seems like cheating to me. It’d be like Superman turning up at a fancy dress party dressed as Superman. Sure, it’s an unusual outfit, but shouldn’t your costume be something different to what you normally wear? Although come to think of it, Clarke Kent dressing as Superman for the Daily Planet Halloween party would actually be a great costume.

Anyway, for those that do celebrate the festival, I hope you had a great time. I’ll leave you with this from the War and Peas comic series.

The one where I vent on a deeply stupid article

I’m happy that BDSM and kink are gradually getting more mainstream exposure. I know some people like the thrill of doing something somewhat illicit, or enjoy being in a secret club that is hard to join, but that never appealed to me. In a philosophical sense I’m a ‘more the merrier’ type  -while being a ‘get the hell out my face and leave me alone’ type in the literal day-to-day sense.

Unfortunately, the problem with more people being aware of kink is that more people are going to write stupid stuff about it. Even worse, they’re going to conflate it with abusive behavior and offer protective cover to assholes who treat people like shit. As a case in point I give you this Rolling Out article on R Kelly and his abusive relationship with Kitti Jones. It’s based on a Rolling Stone article that couldn’t be more cut and dried. It describes classic abuser behavior of isolation, degradation of self-worth, emotional manipulation, finding fault, jealousy, etc. It could be used as a case-study on abusive behavior. Yet somehow, from all that, Rolling Out magazine decides a great article title would be ‘Are women victims or willing BDSM submissives?

The articles final paragraph is jammed with so much stupid bullshit it’s hard to pick out a single quote. Perhaps this is the best, by which I mean absolute worst.

However, the description of Kelly and the multiple women he has been involved with seems to fall into what is known as domination and submission. Kelly can be considered a dom, in these relationships if the women are to be believed.

If the women are to believe, Kelly can be considered an abusive manipulative asshole. It’d be bad enough to try and connect his behavior to a consensual BDSM relationship based on his statements. To try and make that connection via what the women have said is insane.

I’ve no idea what the solution to this kind of journalism is, other than kinksters doing their best to educate people about the importance of negotiation and consent whenever they get the chance. I’ve also no idea what would a suitable image to accompany this kind of post. Maybe this one of a woman responding in the correct way to a man trying to pull off any stupid bullshit in a relationship?

Heavens Above!

I swear a fair amount in daily life. I always find a well placed curse word to be highly satisfying. Typically I never use religious expressions – except when I’m playing. No idea why that is. While I might scatter the odd ‘fuck’ and ‘shit’ around my daily screw-ups, bend me over and beat my ass, and suddenly I’m muttering ‘Oh, God’ and “Jesus! That hurt.’

There are probably some deep psychological issue at work here. Possibly having a domme in charge brings the idea of a higher power to mind. In the meantime I should probably avoid playing with committed Christians. They might take offense and beat me even harder, leading to an endless spiral of blasphemy and increasing violence.

This gentleman seems to be invoking an entire pantheon of higher powers. I’m afraid I don’t have an original source for the image.

More Yapoos

I’m not sure if 11Dutch spotted my post from yesterday or it’s just great blogging karma, but a year after his last Yapoo themed post, he has just put up another one in his series. Even better, he has managed to find someone working on an English translation of the original novel. There are only 3 chapters completed to date (out of a total of 14), but that’s a good start and I’m going to enjoy catching up with what’s there already.

My thanks to 11Dutch for his excellent find and to the translator N A Feathers for the work to date. This is also gives me a chance to feature some more pictures from the Team Rinryu site. I try and avoid posting their more extreme material on my front page, so I’ll go with a couple of drawings from their blog that were obviously based on the Yapoo themes.

Movie Night

I went to watch the new Blade Runner movie tonight. Paltego’s hot take is that it’s a good movie, where the original was a great movie. Ryan Gosling is a perfectly fine actor, but watching this made me appreciate just how good Harrison Ford was in his prime. The original is packed with classic scenes, and while this version has a lot of emotional depths to mine, it never really manages to find them. There’s certainly nothing to match the “I want more life, fucker” or the ‘tears in the rain‘ speech.

From the femdom angle it did strike me that Joe’s electronic companion is the ultimate tease and denial. Beautiful, flirty and entirely untouchable. I also loved the sequence of the woman blowing shit up while getting her nails done. That was a lovely contrast of elegance and controlled brutality.

A big stiffie

Twitter is definitely proving to be a great source for the kind of interesting play images that don’t show up in conventional kinky porn shoots. The image below is from 七海(natsumi) and, as far as I can figure out from the post, she has encased a man in plaster of Paris soaked bandaged. You can see another angle here. I’ve seen plaster used before in scenes, I’ve even been on the receiving end myself, but I don’t think I’ve seen a posed and standing statue created.

It’s a shame there wasn’t a small pedestal she could have put him on. That would have added some nice objectification to the bondage and sensory deprivation. Just in case a full body standing plaster cast wasn’t quite kinky enough for you.

Twittering

So having just burnt a series of posts on the dangers of maintaining dual identities on social media, what’s the next logical thing for me to do? Obviously it’s to create a new social media account. So you can now find me on twitter as @paltego1.

I’m not actually sure what I’m going to do with it. I originally created it just to get rid of all the ‘This media may contain sensitive material’ twitter warnings that were driving me crazy. Sensitive material is 90% of my reason for doing anything online. Then it seemed a good way to follow interesting kinky people. Now I’m debating if I should more actively manage it. Maybe use it as an overflow for links I don’t get to cover here? Or as way to bookmark articles before I have change to write in more detail on them? At the very least I can use it to publish the existence of a new post here.

If you’re a twitter user feel free to follow me and maybe I’ll end up doing something useful with it. I’ll also be on the lookout for interesting people to follow, so feel free to point me at anything or anyone you like!

Twitter does seem a particular rich source for fun kinky shots and short video clips. Most of them are casual shots snapped with a phone, but occasionally you get a gem like the one below. This is Domina M in Paris and was shot by Will Santillo.