Tag: Mainstream

It’s all about the dick

Custom fit condoms are now a thing according to this article in the Old Gray Lady. Rather than the standard length range of 6.7 to 8.3 inches, you can get myONE Perfect Fit condoms in sizes of 4.9 to 9.4 inches, with a similar degree of variation available on width. They’ve obviously thought through the psychological aspects of getting men to report a penis measurement accurately…

The template that men are given to measure themselves does not include inches or centimeters, instead using randomly ordered letters and numbers. One man might be E99, another Z22.

Of course, given the fact that people can fetishize absolutely anything, if these take off, I’m sure that in 10 years time there will be SPH guys requesting roleplay dialog along the lines of…

You’re a dirty little C11, aren’t you? You’re barely filling that thing. More like a E77 as far as I can see, you nasty worm.

The image below doesn’t have any explicit reference to small penis humiliation. Or any humiliation at all, for that matter. Yet I challenge any male reader to look at those smirks and not feel that somewhere somebody is failing to measure up, and just maybe, it’s them. Hell, I’m not into humiliation at all, and I still get a slight frisson from this image.

This is from the Quality Control site.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

This wasn’t in Drivers Ed

Apparently in Japan it’s permissible for women to slap male drivers who don’t apply the brakes smoothly. I base this unlikely statement on this advert from Nissan and the fact that advertisers have never lied to me. Femdom fans should therefore avoid at all costs Nissan’s new e-Power system, with threatens to put an end to all to this facial brutality.

Based on its style, this face slapping artwork is clearly by Namio Harukawa.

Off on my travels

I’m taking off to San Francisco for a vacation. As is usual for my trips, good food and kinky fun is the plan of record. Like I did for LA earlier this year, I’m going to try playing with someone I know well and someone new. I figure that’s a good way to simultaneously broaden my experiences while also building on past relationships. Although, after getting beaten up multiple times in the space of a few days, my body might not be a fan of my plan.

Normally at this point I’d offer pre-apologies for a potential lack of blogging. But quite frankly, given my busy recent life and slack blogging, a vacation might actually give me chance to write more than usual. We’ll see how that works out.

I’ll leave you with an image that I like, but I have absolutely no context for. I originally assumed it was from a fashion shoot, but nothing like that showed up on an image search. I believe it’s the actress Gwendoline Christie, but exactly why she’s decided to grab this gentleman by the face, I’ve no idea.