Tag: Photograph

A Trio of Asian-American Dominatrixes

Allure magazine has an interesting article on three Asian-American dommes. It features Mistress Lucy Sweetkill, Domina Dia Dynasty and Yin Q, and describes some of their experiences dealing with the stereotypes that come with the job and their ethnicity.

Even at her former job in fashion, Lucy’s employees would refer to her as a “dragon lady,” in both an endearing and negative way. She likes the association. “Yes, that’s definitely me. I’m a boss ass bitch,” Lucy says proudly. The association certainly helps in her positionality as a dominatrix and sex worker: She says her clients fear her.

I think the article does a pretty good job of describing BDSM and kink to its non-kinky readers, while also still giving some interesting perspectives to those of us who frequent sites like this one.

Although the online version is in Allure magazine, the article was originally published in Banana Magazine, issue 4.

Meet the New Boss

There was a new US Congress sworn in today. I think the political system here is too dysfunctional to hope for any significant change, but there was one statistic that caught my eye. In 1989 there were 16 Democratic women in the US House of Representatives. This year there are 89. Admittedly that’s still only 37% of the 235 Democratic seats they currently hold, but it’s still progress to be welcomed. Of course over the same period the Republicans have gone from a total of 13 women to – wait for it – 13 women. So not so much progress on that front. I think whatever your politics, if you regularly read this blog, you should welcome more women to positions of power and influence.

The image below is Kyrsten Sinema being sworn in to the Senate by Mike Pence. She’s the first openly bisexual woman to serve in the Senate and was sworn in on a law book, rather than a religious book.  I think those facts are both great. That fact Mike Pence would undoubtedly hate them makes the moment even better. And, I don’t to be shallow about this important moment, but she has also looks fantastic.

Save All The Things!

I have a hoarding problem. Not, I hasten to add, in the physical world. There,  with the exception of kitchen equipment, I tend to the minimal. My hoarding problem is in the virtual world of information. I hate the idea of losing content. It’s so easy to copy around – it happens for every visit on every page for every image – yet we do such a terrible job of preserving old digital sources.

When tumblr announced it was banning all adult content I was therefore particularly perturbed, and set about locally archiving what I could. The initial idea was to just save sites I liked to use as image sources for this blog. I figured I could sort and catalog it all later. That seemed like a fun way to spend the holiday period. However, once I had the pipeline setup and ticking along, things got maybe a little out of hand.

When I finally pulled it all together and de-duplicated, I discovered I’d got  5.1 million images from about 400 sites occupying over 3TB of space. Oops. The cataloging process might therefore be a touch more time consuming than I first thought. Let’s say I want to run through all images just once and spend just 4 seconds per image. With a lot of animated gifs involved, that seems like a pretty fast average pace. If I devote 2 hours every day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year, I should be done in a little over 7 years and 9 months. Alternatively, I could quit my job entirely, put in a solid 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and be done in a bit over 2 years and 8 months. Piece of cake.

I guess the good news is that there’s no danger of me running out of images to post. The bad news is that I’m not sure how I’ll be able to sort through them all to find the good stuff.

Talking of archiving content, here’s an old image from the Leda / NuWest company. I’d guess its from the mid to late 80’s. I found it via the now unavailable ‘x ray blue eyes’ tumblr. That was the single largest tumblr site I archived, with 355,247 images. That’s a lot of femdom.

Dick Dilemma

I always enjoy discovering something that is simultaneously entirely new to me and, at the same time, completely obvious in hindsight. That sense of being surprised and then cynically not surprised at all is somehow very satisfying. My latest example of this in action is a tweet by Bastienne Cross, quoted below.

Forced Bi Fans: SERIOUSLY FUCK OFF WITH YOUR DICK PICKINESS. Either be willing to pay more for me to hire a professional for you or SUCK WHATEVER FUCKING DICK I PUT IN FRONT OF YOUR MOUTH.

You’d think that the point of a ‘forced bi’ scene would be to deal with an unwanted dick situation, but of course fantasy and reality have a way of diverging in unexpected ways. While I sympathize with Mistress Cross, I do think there’s a lot of comedy potential in the scenario. I picture the submissive going from “Oh no, please don’t make me Mistress. That’s so dirty” into “Oh no…jeez, what the fuck is that? Wow. Like seriously. You think I’m sticking that in my mouth?”

As is often the case – when you want reality to match your fantasy, hire a professional to make it happen. Good looking cocks don’t often show up for free.

I’m afraid I don’t know where this image originates from. However, I would say it’s a fair bet that most of Bastienne Cross’ force-bi fans would not complain if this particular dick was presented to them.

Puppy Play

The rather sexy image below is from Lady Pim who plays out of the Ritual Chamber in Toronto. She also has a short but informative thread on puppy play here.

I’ve never yet indulged in this kink, but it does make sense to me. It pushes buttons around giving up control, obedience, caring dominance, physical restraint, etc. Like a lot of BDSM dynamics, it allows the submissive to simplify his thinking, give up real world concerns and focus on the dominant and her instructions.

Grassy notes, with a touch of asparagus and oak on the nose

I was flipping rapidly through my twitter feed the other day when I noticed a domme pitching her ‘selectively crafted artisinal pee’. Now I know a lot of dommes are proud of their healthy diets and the resulting liquid output, but ‘artisinal’ was a new one for me. Since the dictionary definition is something ‘traditionally created using non-mechanical means’, doesn’t that make all pee artisinal? Are their any mass produced golden showers out there for submissive on the go who doesn’t have the time to really enjoy an artisinal product?

Fortunately, when I flicked back to check out exactly what I’d seen, it turned out to be a random ad that twitter has snuck in for artisinal *tea*. Which made a lot more sense. I don’t think the world is ready for the intersection of the pretensions of the beverage tasting world with the kinky world of golden showers.

I’m not exactly sure where this is from, but that’s one very happy looking wet dude.

Balcony Shenanigans

It’s damp and cold in Seattle right now, which makes these recent shots by Lady Hinako and Jordyn Fox particularly appealing. I love their smiles in the first image.

I’m currently being inundated with Christmas cards featuring happy families in amazing locations. It used to be that Christmas cards were generic shots of Santa, stables, mangers, stars and holly. The card was generic but the the message personal. Now cards seem to be a physical version of Instagram, customized with photographs that emphasize what a fabulous lifestyle all my friends have. The cards are less greetings and more tribal markers of success. I think next year I’m going to arrange some personal images like this for my cards. You send me shots of your rugrats frolicking on a Caribbean beach, and I’ll send you shots of  me in bondage,  getting fucked up by gorgeous women in leather. If you want to highlight how well you’re doing at life, I think it’s only fair that I get to do the same in my own peculiar way. Or we could all switch back to Santa, holly and wreaths. I’m OK either way.

BDSMLR

With tumblr dead, the destination of choice for a lot of kinky blogs seems to be bdsmlr. A big part of me really wants the site to succeed. I was a fan of all the interesting erotic imagery on tumblr and would love to see somewhere that could migrate to. Unfortunately, right now I think that the jury is still out on bdsmlr.

At the moment they’re still struggling to deal with the influx of ex-tumblr folks and all the extra traffic involved. The site UI is a little clunky and lacks the polish of tumblr. It’s relatively easy to get some sort of service off the ground, but it’s tough to make it scalable, manageable and usable. There’s an old saying in software development that the last 10% of the project takes 90% of the work, and I think the site developers aren’t even into that part of the problem space yet.

Also, as Ferns pointed out via a comment, we don’t really know anything about the owners of the site. There’s no background on the company or the people. The original TOS they had was terrible, giving them rights to anything shared via their site. They did change that – making me think it was simply something they copy/pasted from elsewhere – but it does indicate a lack of diligence around a pretty critical area.

Probably the thing that most pisses me off about it is actually no fault of the bdsmlr team at all. It’s down to the clusterfuck that is SESTA/FOSTA. As it stands their TOS completely bars  usage of the site that mentions sex work. Any kind of paid service mention gets you banned. So we’re in a situation where 95% or more of the site’s content will be created by various types of sex workers, yet they will derive zero benefit from it. In fact they’ll be barred from the site should they try and extract some tiny benefit. Most social media sites have generally been very negative on sex to date, but it takes some special type of legal fuckery to create a site that’s positive about kinky sex imagery but entirely negative about the people who create it.

All that said, and having spent an entire post picking at its flaws, I would still encourage you to check out bdsmlr. The SESTA/FOSTA bullshit is not their fault, and it’s entirely possible they’ll shake off their growing pains and deliver a solid service. The basic idea is a good one. You have to register to browse it, but it’s an easy process, and only takes a minute or two. I like the idea, and should they become big and successful, maybe they’ll be in a position to help out in the ongoing legal battle over sex work.

Here’s another image from a now defunct tumblr that I archived for reference purposes – Continuous State of Desire. I’m afraid I don’t know the original source for the photograph.

Good Job Tumblr

The final banishment of adult content from Tumblr was an entirely predictable shit show. Huge swathes of carefully curated content vanished, including pretty much every link on my image page.  It was pretty depressing looking around it in the last few days, with a lot of people saying goodbye to their followers and goodbye to all the time they’d invested in the platform.

People who actually tried to follow the rules and clean up their site found that it was impossible to flip it back to a non-explicit status, rendering their site worthless. Meanwhile I found endless examples of very explicit images still being shown, often right next to images that were blocked. Either the blocked ones were so graphic they’d have made my eyes bleed or, more likely, tumblrs filtering algorithms are useless. So they destroyed a lot of online communities, pissed content creators off, lost a huge chunk of their users and still ended up showing people porn. All in all, a great week of work for them.

Luckily their incompetence does have a minor benefit. As I posted on twitter,  you can actually still use TumblThree to rip any tumblr back to your local hard drive. This includes tumblr’s that send you to the block screen or that have explicit images covered up. All the content is still there, and you can typically pull a tumblr with a few thousand images in just a few minutes. I’m sure they’ll close this hole pretty soon, but right now it’s still a good option for archiving any favorite sites you had.

In the meantime a lot of people  seem to be heading to bdsmlr as the tumblr clone of choice for kinky people. I get the logic of their name, but it doesn’t exactly trip off the tongue. I’ll post some follow-up thoughts on that site tomorrow. In the meantime he’s an image from a tumblr that I definitely archived for my personal future ‘reference’ purposes – Alternative Femdom.

I believe this was originally shot by Alvaro Hernandez