Schroedinger’s muff

The only reason this post exists is so I can use that most excellent title. It’s stolen from this very amusing post by the Girl on the Net mocking a Marie Claire article. Apparently real women have certain pre-sex rituals. So if you’re a man sleeping with a woman, it’s probably worth checking the article to make sure you haven’t been fobbed off with a facsimile of a real woman. If you’re a woman reading this, then I’d suggest avoiding the article all together. Otherwise you risk being thrown into the kind of metaphysical crisis the Girl on the Net alludes to.

Real women shave their bikini lines, and simultaneously do not shave their bikini lines, like Schroedinger’s muff.

Cats are one thing, but nobody wants to be messing around with quantum waveforms in the genital region.
MuffThe image above is from the Submissive Cuckolds site. In this case I’m not sure the muff is actually being observed, but it’s certainly being interacted with. I think from a philosophical perspective that collapse the superposition of states and doesn’t result in a quantum mechanical paradox. I’m sure her boyfriend on the other end of the phone will be relieved to hear that.

Coffee and cunnilingus

I think all four drawings here are cute, but I particularly like the first one. Some people like their coffee first thing in the morning. Personally I like it as a mid-afternoon pick-me-up. Whatever the time, I have to think that oral sex would be a ‘Nice’ bonus to add to it. Maybe Starbucks should put this drawing on all their cups for the new year?

Coffee and cunnilingusThere’s no artist signature on the image (or somebody has chopped it off) and I didn’t find anything useful via a reverse image search. If anyone can help me attribute it to the original creator then please leave a comment or drop me an email.

Hommage

I find it slightly disturbing when I make connections between femdom artists, photographers or performers. Being an expert on pre-raphaelite painting or the films of Ingmar Bergman (for example) would typically be seen a source of pride. Recognizing a particular pro-domme from a random tumblr photograph, knowing the dungeon it was taken in and figuring out the publisher from the style of shot, is a somewhat less marketable skill.

The artwork below is entitled ‘Her Kinky Wishes‘ and is by ashfaq-ayon. It’s a lovely drawing, but on seeing it I immediately recognized the inspiration of Rodzo’s work. It’s a very different artistic style, but the composition, text and set-up is pure Rodzo. I like it a lot, although I think the more realistic style makes the male posture look even more impossible than in the original inspiration.

Her Kinky Wishes by ashfaq ayon

Fetlife Fail

Fetlife has been in the news recently for all the wrong reasons. Somebody scraped a bunch of user data off it and published it on the open web. This wasn’t a hack. They simply created a normal free account, which just takes a few seconds, and then ran a script to browse the site and download user profiles accessible to all fetlife users. They claimed that this was to demonstrate the lack of security in Fetlife. That position was undermined somewhat by the fact that they only took data from female users under 30 years old and published it in a file called ‘The Fetlife Meatlist’.

Understandably this pissed a lot of people off leading to articles like this and this. While the person who did it is obviously an asshole, I can’t say I was particularly surprised. There have been numerous articles over the years highlighting this potential attack, as well as previous technical demonstrations of the approach. Of course that doesn’t much help the 99% of Fetlife users who are busy getting kinky rather than reading techy sex blog articles.

It’s tempting to say that you should expect anything published online to be public. That’s both true and missing the point. Privacy is not a binary concept. At one extreme you have things like password protected accounts for storing private cellphone photographs. At the other you have sites like reddit and blogs like this one. To access the former you need either a hacker or a security flaw in the storage system. To access the latter you just need a web browser and an internet connection. Neither provides guaranteed privacy, as a lot of celebrities recently found out. Yet expectations of the two are clearly different.

Social media sites like Fetlife and Facebook fall someone between those two extremes. The problem is that their business model of eyeballs and advertisers pulls them towards the openness of a reddit or a blog. The expectation of their users, particularly for a content sensitive site like Fetlife, pulls towards greater privacy and protection. To date it seems that Fetlife has biased towards its advertisers over its users. So yes, you should always work on the assumption that anything stored online may become public. But that doesn’t absolve Fetlife of the responsibility to strike the right balance between its business model and its users privacy.

In the meantime, if you do take kinky selfies, be careful how you share them. Although if anyone wants to send me some, I promise to be careful with them!

'Selfie' by Gracy GimpThis is by the Belgium artist Benoit Feroumont, who posts his erotic work under the handle Gracy Gimp.

Ignored is bliss

Is there a specific fetish for being ignored during a sexual interaction? Given there’s a fetish for pretty much everything imaginable (rule 34), I have to assume there is. I guess it’s the flip-side to the cuckold scenario. There someone is ignored because of a more appealing sexual option. Here the gentleman appears to be being ignored because of a more appealing magazine. I’m not sure if this image is just crappy porn or some zen level kink.

Ignored
I’m afraid I don’t know who originally created this image. I found it via the darkknitting tumblr.

Kisses

I like the idea behind this shot, but I’m less sure about the execution. Shouldn’t a kiss to a body be more of a puckered lip shape? These look like open mouth pressed on lips rather than actually kisses, which seems weird. Maybe I’m over thinking things, but these kisses look kind of odd. Anyway, it’s a nice idea regardless of what I think about the execution.

KissesI’m afraid I don’t have an original source for this image.

Turning the screw

After my previous post on Seedfeeder I though a follow-up with some artwork from Rodzo would be appropriate. Their work is stylistically similar, with minimal backgrounds, cleanly drawn figures and simple unfussy lines. They both remind me of illustrators of textbooks or instruction manuals. In Rodzo’s case that would almost certainly be a manual on face sitting and forced oral sex, as his themes are very consistent.

Despite years of looking at erotic images, I’m still intrigued by what pushes my buttons and why. The images below, particularly the first one, really caught my attention, but it’s not entirely clear to me what the trigger factor is. I think it’s the contrast between the serious and brutal metal bondage and her sweet expression. She looks almost demure, and oral sex is such a tender act, yet those clamps and her need to tighten them suggest a different type of interaction.

Rodzo artwork
Rodzo artworkI found these on the Equally Deep In Your Eyes tumblr.

Running the numbers

The study of sexual fantasies that I talked about in yesterday’s post contained some interesting percentages for D/s scenarios. It was simultaneously predictable and surprising.

The predictable bit was the breakdown across the genders. More men fantasize about dominating than being dominated (60% vs 53%). More women fantasize about being dominated than dominating someone else (65% vs 47%). One can argue about the reasons for that split, but it doesn’t surprise me. What did was the absolute value of the percentages. I wouldn’t have guessed that over 50% of men had fantasized about submitting and that almost 50% of women had fantasized about dominating. I’d have predicted much lower numbers.

Of course, as is always the case with these surveys, the devil is in the detail. There’s a big difference between a question framed as ‘Have you ever…” versus ‘Do you sometimes…’ The term dominated is also a very broad one. I suspect if I surveyed my male readers and asked them what being dominated meant, their minds would turn to leather, whips, chains, thigh high boots and Amazonian goddesses wielding enormous strap-ons. You know – all the usual everyday stuff. I don’t know what was in the minds of the 47% of women in this study who fantasized about dominating, but it probably didn’t match up too closely with that. Some of them might simply have meant cunnilingus that lasts as long as they want and great sex with them on top.

Oral SexImage is from the Classy Femdom tumblr. I don’t have an original source.

The sex selfie

Is it really a selfie if it’s a shot of more than one person? Isn’t that simply a group portrait, so it should really be a grolfie? Also, why hasn’t the endlessly creative internet come up with a catchy name for a sex selfie yet? What is that infinite collection of monkeys playing around at?

I realize these questions are probably not top of mind for the gentleman below, but they’re the kind of things that can keep me awake at nights. I could really use a suitably positioned naked bottom to distract me.

SelfieI found this on the Femdom Marriage tumblr. Thanks to a helpful comment I can now attribute the original source to Sex Tales of a Diva.

People tell me I’m white…

I really liked this image when I first stumbled across it. She has a beautiful smile, and their contrasting skin tone is aesthetically pleasing. I was less enamored of it when I dug into its source and discovered it came from a site called Black Girls White Slaves. Even though the photograph was unchanged, the fetishization of the racial elements spoiled it somewhat.

I don’t write about racial kinks here. I’m probably the least qualified person in the world to do so. I’m a white guy who grew up in a small English village, went to a very traditional homogeneous English university and now works in tech on the US West coast. That makes me both privileged and ignorant in this area. I have an instinctive discomfort when confronted with race based kinks, but I’ve never analyzed that deeply enough to figure out if it’s rooted in genuine intellectual problems with them or simple liberal squeamishness with the idea of making an issue of race.

That said, I will make one observation that’s very indirectly related to this area: When watching US television, you can always instantly tell the relationship pairings. It doesn’t matter if it’s an advertisement or a sitcom. There will always be a mix of races, and almost zero interracial couples. I didn’t set out to observe this, it was simply something that was obvious to me when I moved here and was surrounded by US culture. I don’t think it’s true for the actual people living here, but it’s certainly true for what they get to watch on television. I wouldn’t claim that as a causal factor in racial fetishes, but I suspect it’s symptomatic of the kind of cultural influences that create them.

Slave on a choke chain

For those that don’t recognize it, the post title is from a long running joke on the Colbert Report. Stephen will start with “I don’t see race. People tell me I’m white…” and then finish with some punchline featuring a white stereotype. For example – Now, I don’t see color. People tell me I’m white and I believe them because police officers call me “sir”. Or, check out this clip for another example.