Vintage femdom

After all this talk of the perils of modern technology I thought a change of pace was called for. This is from the era when all a gentleman had to worry about his housekeeper finding his erotic etchings hidden at the bottom of his study desk drawer. This is entitled ‘Mistress and Slave’ and dates from between 1910 and 1920. The telephone had been invented by that time, but we were still about 60 years away from the internet and 80 years from the smartphone.

MistressAndSlaveI found this via the History of BDSM tumblr.

Suggestion stupidity

I couldn’t write a series of posts on technology and femdom without touching on the stupidity of auto-suggest. If there’s a single thing that bugs me about web search and browsers, it would be this.

On the one hand, my phone’s web browser is incredibly keen to suggest this site. I just have to type ‘f’ into the address bar and it pops this site up as an option. That can make it a touch nerve wracking when I’m out in a bar and someone borrows my phone to look at something. Pretty much any adult site I’ve visited can pop up based on just a single letter entered into the address bar.

On the other hand, Google’s search suggestions are incredible prudish. I can type ‘femdom’ into the search box and it still will not give me any query suggestions. At that point, what does it think I’m looking for? Who is going to accidentally type ‘femdom’ in and get upset at the suggestions that might pop up? There’s not a lot of ambiguity there. Similarly, its image search really resists showing porn. Searching for ‘domme‘ returns medieval architecture and ‘spanking‘ returns a lot of images of children being hit.

All this means that in some cases a single letter is enough to trigger a porn site prompt, and in others a very precise and unambiguous query fails to trigger it. Good job tech companies. That’s a spectacularly bad job of understanding user intent.

SmilingSelfieThe image is another example of a sexy cellphone selfie. I’m afraid I don’t know who created it.

Information leakage

The nightmarish situation I described in my previous post – a work presentation featuring porn of yours truly – is (hopefully) unlikely to happen in real life. I keep a religious separation between my work laptop and my personal one that I use for posts like this. I also maintain very separate email identities, including one for work, one for my personal life and one for this blog. However, despite all that, it can sometimes be difficult to stop all information leakage. Technology companies have a vested interested in gathering information about you and connecting it together. The greater the number of datapoints they can correlate the more valuable that information is. Information = power = $1bn IPO.

I think the biggest risk at present is smart phones. They’re a nexus where many different streams of identities can meet. People may differentiate between work and home computers, but they don’t always do the same thing for the computer in their pocket. Which means software on it can potentially access your location, all your email accounts, all your phone records, all your text messages and all your social media. It’s typically possible to configure it not to do that, but technology companies have a vested interest in the information, so configuration defaults tend to be permissive in the data they expose.

My scariest information leak was due to my phone. I’d been using it to snap session photographs. It had also been set-up to access my personal email account and, unbeknownst to me, that meant it would also automatically upload photographs to a private storage space in the cloud. Nobody could see them, so in theory no big deal, right up to the moment I added that email account to a new work laptop. I didn’t think there was any danger because it wasn’t an account I used for anything blog, porn or BDSM related. It was just for chatting to friends and shopping online. But now there was a path for information to leak along. The final step in that path was a screensaver on the laptop that would rotate through photographs from your online photo albums. You can probably imagine what happened next. Luckily I was just chatting to a couple of people in my office when naked me appeared on the screen. I had chance to quickly shut the lid before anyone spotted anything. If I’d been projecting onto a big screen in a meeting it could have been a career limiting moment.

I’ll leave you with a couple capturing their own personal moment via their phone. Hopefully the leakage of this photograph onto the net was intentional.

Selfie

Presentation anxiety

Last week at work was a busy one for me. Most of it was spent preparing a presentation for a senior company executive on Friday afternoon. This process wasn’t helped by a very vivid dream I had on the Thursday night featuring a powerpoint deck that started with an image of me being fisted. It was a slow motion car crash of a dream. Nobody in the meeting appeared to notice what had flashed up, but I somehow couldn’t get the laptop to advance to the next slide. There’s a close-up of my naked ass and a lady’s wrist up on a big screen, but everyone’s still making pre-meeting small talk while I frantically hammer at the keyboard. The sense of dread that would someone notice before I could fix it was intense.

In the event the actual presentation went fine. No fisting or naked me was involved. However, I did check and re-check the presentation at least 6 or 7 times before sending it out. I’m not sure whether the dream was a simple presentation anxiety about being unprepared or a deeper one about about the real me being ‘found out’. Possibly it was the latter manifesting itself via the stress of the former.

femdom-anal-fisting-2
femdom-anal-fisting-6These two images are from the Kinky Mistresses site. She looks to be having fun with the situation.

O Face

Here’s an image of a lady with a great facial expression. I guess he’s doing something right. I wonder if the nipple pulling is just for added encouragement or a subtle way to control the stimulation? Maybe he’s like an old radio. You twiddle the knobs, mash the buttons and bang on the side, and eventually you get something you like out of it.

OFace

Interior design

Here’s a final post in my short series featuring fancy playspaces. It’s back to our old friend kink.com and specifically an article in a architecture magazine on their Armory building space. There’s no particularly striking revelations in there, but it has got some interesting shots of the empty sets and the building space. If you ever wanted to see the ‘creepy bedroom’ set or the ‘dirty showers’ set without being distracted by the naked people, here’s your chance.

Alternatively, for those of us who like some naked people in their kinky playspaces, here’s Lorelei Lee and Vince Ferelli in what looks like the padded cell set. This is obviously a shot for Divine Bitches.

Lorelei Lee in the padded cell

Comfy shoes

After all the high tech VR posts, I’m going old school with this one. A naked person, some nipple play and a traditional St. Andrews cross.

Clearly the gentleman is enjoying the situation and, quite frankly I can’t blame him for that. But what really caught my eye was the shoes they’re wearing. BDSM imagery is full of ridiculous high heels and boots sporting a hundred and one straps and buckles. It make me smile to see someone wearing comfortable shoes and socks. Their might be some bondage and nipple torture going on, but there’s no reason anyone’s toes should get cold.

ComfyShoesThis is from the specimen01 tumblr aka ‘A Journey into Utopian Femdom’. It has a lot of good images on it from the same couple. I particularly liked this one featuring the comfy shoes and a great smirk.

Objectification (of the bad sort)

In the last week the British press has been full of a story featuring John Whittingdale – a politician and member of the government – and a dominatrix who worked under the title Mistress Kate. Almost universally the coverage of it has been terrible and depressing. The facts seem fairly straightforward: They met via match.com in late 2013 and dated for six months. He allegedly had no idea what work she did until someone tried to sell the story in early 2014. When he found he broke off the relationship. In 2015 he was appointed to a more senior goverment position, one related to press regulation, and in 2016 the story broke in the newspapers.

The depressing element in most of the coverage (for example this) is how they objectify the woman involved. She is made to seem entirely ‘other’. Given they dated for 6 months, and attended a number of events together, they presumably had made a connection. Their meeting on a conventional dating site suggests it was just two people looking for a partner and a relationship. Yet in the articles she’s reduced to a purely sexual persona based on her job. She’s a chance for papers to list some titillating details about her dungeon or services while pointing at him for being so stupid as to date such a person. It’s taken as read that obviously he’d break off the relationship when he found out. Everyone involved, both him and the journalists, seem to treat her a non-person once her role as a sex-worker was revealed. It’s a horrible thing to see.

Even the more positive writers seem to miss the point. Articles like this and this use the story to make the point that seeing a dominatrix is a perfectly fine thing to do. Obviously I agree with that general point, but it once again objectifies the woman by equating her with her job. She’s a sex worker, and a pro-domme. Emphasis on work and pro. Maybe she’s kinky in her private life but maybe not. And if she is kinky at home, she might be a domme, a switch or a submissive. They met on match.com, not on fetlife and there’s no indication I’ve seen that they had a D/s relationship. It’s a bit like hearing somebody is dating a professional chef and exclaiming ‘Wow, you must really love food!’ Well perhaps the chef cooks at home and a passion for food is one of the elements that brought them together. But maybe they’ve many other things beside that in common, or perhaps the chef doesn’t like to cook at home, or it might just be a job to the chef. We can separate people from their professions in almost all other cases, yet not it seems when it comes to sex workers.

Given this post has been all about the unpleasant kind of objectification, let’s finish with something more cheerful. This is the sexy and more literal kind of objectification.

Stool

Domina Mea

I was planning to write about the latest English political scandal – featuring a goverment minister and a dominatrix. But frankly, I’m tired and the coverage of the story is too depressing. So maybe I’ll save that for the weekend. In the meantime, I’m going old school with this post.

The artwork below, called Domina Mea, is circa 1930 and by the German artist Rudolf Schlichter. I found it via the Pitt Prickel tumblr. There’s a nice write up on the background of the artist at the ‘he stoops to worship’ blog. Unsurprisingly his work was banned by the Nazi’s as degenerate.

DominaMea

How absurd

It looks like someone is regretting lost opportunities from the past. Of course, the key in these situation is not to look backwards, but on the possibilities to come. Pun very definitely intended.

AbsurdThe style is clearly of a Japanese Manga, but I’m afraid I don’t know the artist. I think it’s from a series called Prison School. I found it via the Lunar Black tumblr.