Tag: Photograph

End of an era in SF

By strange coincidence, just after my previous post on Kink.com and their famous San Francisco studios, this article popped up in my news feed – End Of An Era: Kink.com To Stop Filming In Its Famous Porn Dungeon.

It seems that this change was triggered, in part at least, by a combination of falling revenue and the difficulty in maximizing use of the Armory building. Less people are buying porn and mainstream companies don’t like to share space with famous kinky porn studios. The new approach will be to keep just the kink.com offices in the Armory, making it easier to lease/repurpose the remaining space, and then spread the filming to other sets and studios. Given the high cost of San Francisco rent, that may mean directors building their own facilities in LA or Vegas.

I certainly wouldn’t hold kink.com up as an exemplar for femdom porn. Their shoots tend to play to a lot of the classic femdom stereotypes. High in leather, snarling and sneering. Low in emotional connection, sensuality and fun. They’ve also had allegations of workplace mistreatment. However, all that said, I am sad to hear they’re no longer going to be shooting at the armory. It always seemed amazing that a kink dedicated company could buy a run such a big and impressive property in one of the most expensive cities in America. I can remember when kinky material was obscure, hard to find and (frequently) cheaply shot. Now we have dedicated riggers and set designers putting together complex scenes and fiendish equipment in a huge army building in the middle of SF. For me that building was a physical embodiment of kinks transition from obscurity to mainstream success.

I hope their new approach will allow them to stay viable. If you like their stuff, then now would obviously be a good time to subscribe. Femdom is a lot lot more than humiliation, pain and fancy bondage, but there’s no reason those elements can’t also be some part of it, and kink.com often did a pretty good job on them

These two shots are of Claire Adams and EuroSex from the old Men in Pain channel.

Kink: The Documentary

I finally got around to watching the documentary on the Kink film studios by James Franco. Not sure why it took me so long, given I blogged about it being available on Netflix back in 2015, but there we are. Verdict: OK but not great. Probably if you knew nothing about BDSM then it’d be eye opening, but for me, and I suspect most of my readers, it was watchable without being particular deep or informative. On the plus side, it did have a good balance of Fm, Mm, Mf, etc. I was concerned it’d be heavy on the Mf side, but it was pretty even with a lot of screen time for people like Maitresse Madeline and Princess Donna.

One thing that did surprise me was the lack of experience that a lot of the performers demonstrated. Some years ago, a pro-domme who’d actually filmed a number of scenes for the studio told me  – with some disparagement in her voice – that the directors really drove the scenes and the performers did as they were told. As someone who liked to create her own scenes with their own dynamic, this wasn’t a happy situation for her. Having watched the documentary, I can see what she meant. The directors and Kink employees were obviously experts, but some of the performers seemed to be fairly inexperienced with BDSM techniques. I’m certainly no expert, but I think my scene negotiation is crisper and clearer than one of the early Fm shoots they showed. The guy who was about to do a submissive role on camera seemed initially confused by the concept of caning, and was pretty vague in most of his answers. I guess the overlap between experienced BDSM players and hot, fit people willing to appear on camera is smaller than I thought.

As far as the documentary structure goes, I think they’d have been better off picking a very inexperienced new kink performer, along with an experienced older performer, and then following their personal stories. That character focus would have made for a more relatable film, and allowed them to dig deeper into the why and how people get involved in both BDSM and BDSM porn. All that said, it was a positive documentary that showed kinky people in a generally good light, so that’s at least a win.

This is Mistress Madeline with Curt Wooster in a shoot for Kink’s Divine Bitches site.

Time well spent

You know you’ve probably spent too much time hanging out on kink and fetish tumblr’s when you see an article titled – We Talked to a Professional Cuck About the ‘Alt-Right’– and your first response is ‘I bet I recognize the guy’. Sure enough, the gentleman in question is Jimmy Broadway, a familiar face to me (and doubtless other readers). I’m positive he’s featured in past posts here, although I can’t currently put my finger on them.

Anyway, the article itself is thankfully light on the political slant, and heavier on his experiences filming and performing. He also has a twitter account if you’re interested in reading more from behind the scenes and how the sausage gets made, or I guess in this case, sucked.

Here’s Jimmy in a Divine Bitches cuckold shot that feature a pair of classic expressions. I almost feel I should run this image as a humorous caption competition.

Divine space

According to this article, the Chinese city of Shenyang has created special parking spots just for women. That’s not an entirely new idea. Some cities have dedicated spots for women with young children, or marked spots in well lit and camera covered areas for increased safety. Sadly the Shenyang spots aren’t for those practical reasons. These spots are simply longer and wider (and pinker) to make it easier for women to park in them. Apparently they (allegedly) need help with their parking.

At first glance this seems incredibly sexist and patronizing. But what caught my eye was the labeling of them – Goddess Parking spots. So maybe there’s another explanation. Maybe the city transport division is staffed by femdom fans. They’re not being sexist, they’re just showing respect. If the next rule is that male parking violators have to be whipped by female traffic police, or that the city transport division staff have to clean the parked Goddesses cars in the nude, then we’ll know it’s a femdom fan thing. If not, then I guess we’re back to ‘sexist and patronizing’ as the explanation.

Femdom Car CleaningSadly the Young Dommes site this image is from has ceased to exist.

Trouble in the tubes

My previous post talked about common search terms on PornHub in 2016, and the rarity of kink in them. One possible explanation for that is that kinky people don’t use PornHub. If that unlikely situation were to be true, it would reflect with credit on kinky porn consumers. PornHub, and more particularly its parent company MindGeek, are not healthy positive contributors to the internet’s adult ecosystem.

If you’re interested in some background to that claim then consider checking out this Slate article and this Economist one. Essentially MindGeek holds a monopoly on the free streaming sites (like PornHub, redtube, youporn, etc.), has purchased a bunch of commercial sites (like brazzers, reality kings, etc.) and uses its financial clout to host a lot of pirated content from anyone outside its control. If you’ve ever wondered why I never link to videos hosted by any of the free streaming sites, that would be why. They’re the 800 lb Gorilla that acts destructively but is too big and scary to oppose. I’d suggest avoiding all their sites is both a good and positive thing to do.

Of course there’s always money to be made in the niches. Some people get off on financial blackmail, bullying and predatory tactics. For anyone wired that way, people like Mistress Arella are here to help. She has all sorts of ways to consensually take your hard earned cash.

Mistress Arella

Large cheating ladies

A new year always means one thing – a lot of ‘year in review’ and ‘top trends’ article. They’re the staple of lazy newspapers and bloggers across the world. Throw some sex into the mix and you’ve got instant clickbait. The one that caught this lazy bloggers eye was this from the Independent. According to a very detailed end of year review from PornHub, two of the biggest gaining search terms in the UK in 2016 were ‘Giantess’ and ‘Cuckold’. So if you’re a adult producer targeting the UK, it might be time to start scouting for a very tall lady performer and a couple of guys, at least one of whom can pull off a surprised expression.

Looking across the most searched terms, kink was surprisingly absent. The French and the Italians shared the sudden British curiosity in giantess porn, while the Germans kept their reputation for hardcore S&M by sneaking ballbusting in as a top growing search term. Everything else was the cliched porn terms you’d expect, with ‘lesbians’ leading the way.

I’ll finish the post with a rarity – a cute cuckold shot. Nobody is pulling a silly expression, staring at the camera or being humiliated. I think it’s kind of hot.

Cute Cuckold

Success!

Regular and observant readers will have noticed my blogroll has gone through a few iterations in recent months. My original dynamic one stopped working with the latest versions of WordPress, so I’ve been forced to use a simple static one for the last few weeks. Multiple people left me comments and emails saying how much they liked the old dynamic blogroll, so I spent a bunch of time looking for a good replacement. Unfortunately nothing out there had the performance and the features that I needed.

Luckily, I’m both a software developer and a masochist. I also love my readers. So I took some free time over the holidays to teach myself PHP and WordPress internals (definite masochistic appeal there) and wrote my own. The result can be seen to the right (desktop) or bottom of the page (mobile). This should still give zippy page response times while picking up new posts to display in an hour or two. It also adds some nice features like post snippets and the ability to drop sites that haven’t posted for many months. If anyone spots problems with it or has suggestions for improvements then please let me know via a comment or email.

After wrestling with code and weird bugs for the last few days, I now feel a little bit like this lady. I’ve beaten the software into submission and stand triumphantly above it. Sadly the original source for this image appears to have been less successful and is now a dormant site.

Guns, Girls and Gauloises

I always find myself somewhat conflicted when I come to write about specialized femdom pornography that caters to certain fetish niches. On the one hand it’s undoubtedly true that there’s lack of good porn that captures the intimacy, sensuality and dynamics of femdom relationships. On the other hand, that doesn’t make the sites catering to the more classic fetish niches invalid. I might wish there were more good French restaurants in my town, but that doesn’t mean I should be mad at the Mexican restaurants. Particularly if they’re really good Mexican.

The latest site that prompted this thought process is Perfect Villainess. As its homepage makes clear, it has a very specific focus – the classic femme fatale. For members there are lots of image galleries (200+) of attractive ladies smoking, brandishing guns, flexing crops and offering the camera smoldering looks. If that’s your particular thing, then it’s worth checking out. It’s images only, and solo female only, but I think that works for these kind of classic shots.

In some ways this kind of site is the antithesis of what kinky porn used to be like 10+ years ago. I remember ‘kinky’ image photosets that would start with everyone in full fetish gear, and by image 7 of 100, everyone would be naked and screwing. That was very frustrating. Now it’s a lot easier to find quality sites to scratch specific fetish itches. I can only hope the complexity, depth and variety in those niches continues to grow.

This is Letizia from a gallery on Perfect Villainess. You can follow their tumblr here.

Note the owner of Perfect Villainess dropped me a note and asked if I’d be interested in taking a look at it. I didn’t get anything for writing about it, and I don’t get a cut of anyone who joins. I was just interested in featuring it.