To Nut or Not To Nut

We’re out of Loctober and into No Nut November. It’s just an endless festival of none orgasms at this time of year.

I tend to subscribe to the views expressed in this Stockroom article about No Nut November. Loctober puts the focus on kink and is therefore sex positive. Even if the end result for participants is negative sex. NNN unhealthily shifts the emphasis more to shame and suppressing desire. That’s not surprising given it’s original growth in incel culture.

That said, there are people out there trying to reclaim it and give it a happy new home in kink. For example, the most excellent Maya Midnight posted this to Bluesky.

No Nut November actually started as a lame anti-porn thing but has since become a sexy chastity thing and I just think that’s beautiful

Let’s hope it keeps trending in that direction.

Mentioning Maya does give me an excuse to share this lovely image of her. I’ve always been a big fan of grey hair. And of men in cages of course. This is from her Bluesky feed. You can find her professional site here.

Down Boy

I’m a little behind on my internet culture. When I first spotted this on a tumblr I thought it was just a cute femdom drawing. However, apparently it’s a meme format based on a purported Archie comic from 1975. Redraws of it have been showing up over the last year or so with different characters. It’s not even clear if the original ever existed, although Archie certainly has form in this respect. Whatever the origins and the recent interpretations, I’m a fan.

I’m afraid I don’t know how created this redraw. I think it might be yet another weird internet culture mash-up of these two characters.

Levels of Spooky

One final Halloween themed artwork. This is by the artist KouYou. I’ve featured their work before, including this Christmas piece. I love their cutaway style drawings, particularly all the little details, and this one is no exception. The party at the top looks like fun, but things get serious the further you descend. I’d love to see a similar take on the nine circles of hell from this artist. I think it’d be spectacular.

You can find the posting for the original piece here.

Pumpkin

I’m continuing the Halloween theme with this artwork from Formant. I’ve enjoyed a number of inventive and unusual bondage scenes over the years, some where I was pretty squashed, but I can’t say I’ve ever been incorporated into a literal squash. This’d certainly make for an interesting porch decoration, but would it be a trick or a treat?

This is from a series Formant published to his twitter feed. You can find more by subscribing to his work here or buying his books here.

Witch and Familiar

As we head into Halloween, here’s some seasonally suitable artwork. It’s by Sean (AKA seansketches) and described as ‘Witch Ada and her Leon familiar.’ If you enjoy this piece you’ll be happy to know it’s one of a series of three.

I feel more witches should have Himbo familiars. Terry Pratchett has of course already blazed that trail with the story of Greebo in Witches Abroad.

If you’d like to see more of Sean’s work then check out these links.

The Chancellor

Here’s some cute artwork to head into the weekend with. It’s from a series of four drawings by Yumine Guo, based on a story by Lutarrel.

The Chancellor took the studious third-born, training him to be useful to her in many ways – in public he was her focused administrative secretary; in private he was her footstool when work was long, her punching bag when work was hard, and her personal whore when work was over.

That’s the kind of administration I could really get behind.

You can find more from Yumine on Subscribe Star and more from Lutarrel on AO3.

Getting Medieval

I wouldn’t have expected to find femdom content in an exhibition of medieval art, but I’d have been wrong. The NY Met is running an exhibition called Spectrum of Desire: Love, Sex, and Gender in the Middle Ages which has a few pieces that seem blog worthy. One is a bronze water pitcher depicting the story of Phyllis and Aristotle (as covered here previously). Another is the bronze ‘spanky’ plate show below. Titled ‘Plate with Wife Beating Husband‘ it dates to the Netherlands circa 1480.

If you’re interested in more background the NYT has an article on it (gift link). It runs at the Met Cloister till 29th of March.

Container

Mistress Jadis Ives posted something to Bluesky that gave me pause for thought…

One of the benefits of sessioning with a ProDomme is that it can provide a clean container for your D/s desires that does not impact the rest of your life.

I found that interesting because – while I get the logic – it’s not at all how I see my sessions. For me, visiting a pro-domme unlocked a part of myself that could then grow and extend into my life. It ceased to be an internal fantasy and became real. After my first sessions I began reading about BDSM more widely, started this blog, travelled to cities to play with new people, came out to a subset of my friends, etc. In many ways it felt the reverse of this quote, where sessioning allowed me to take my D/s desires out of their container and into the world.

That’s not say Mistress Jadis Ives is wrong! I’m sure there are a lot of people for whom this very much does apply. Which makes me curious what the more common experience among pro-domme clients is. Do most compartmentalize? I’m single and pretty independent, so I don’t have strict lines of demarcation to draw. If I was married to a non-kinky partner, maybe I’d feel differently.

Of course, I couldn’t do a post on dommes and containers, without featuring the literal version. This is from Warsaw Prison and their Prison Stay experience. I love the solidity of that container.

The Bad Wife

My last post was a one-off ‘fetish or fashion?’ special. Thanks to those who commented and I hope it was a fun one to guess at. The answer is: Fetish! Although I think it would be perfectly at home in a fashion magazine. The source is Natalie Noir who posted it here. Using photographs from Natalie in these kind of posts is a bit of a cheat code. Almost anything she posts is beautiful with great fashion and fetish vibes (as previously featured).

I thought it’d be good to complement the last ‘fetish but could be fashion’ image with a reverse example. This is the actress Julianna Margulies as featured in Harpers Magazine in 2011 under the title ‘The Bad Wife’. That’s obviously a play on her TV show ‘The Good Wife‘. I’m sure for a lot of readers we’d happily swap the good for the bad here.

Fetish or Fashion (one off)

Longtime readers may remember my occasional series entitled ‘fetish or fashion?’ It’s where I post a series of images and ask people to guess if they’re from a fetish or fashion context. You can see the last series starting here and ending here.

I don’t have time to run a full series right now. However, I stumbled across this image recently and thought it’d make a fun one-off post. Is this fashion or fetish? The answer tomorrow!