The Dishevelled Domina put up a post a few days ago that got me thinking about the process of sex blogging and image sharing. The post was entitled ‘Yer not the boss of me!‘ and was a good rant about tumblr’s that accompany their images with very broad sweeping statements about the right way to behave. For example, captions of the form “a real mistress will lock her husband up, throw away the key, and fuck other men” or “inspections are one of the things that a true Mistress knows how to do correctly.” DD was, to put it mildly, not a fan of such things.
To a large extent I’m with her on this one. I find the best image+commentary blogs are the ones that concentrate on their personal reactions to an image. They supply background, point out details or add a little humor. Spanking blog and bondage blog are two good examples of this approach, and it’s one I’ve always tried to follow. I don’t want to reinterpret an image, or interpose myself between it and the viewer, I just want to share my feelings about what I see. As soon as you start adding specific context to an image then you’re no longer sharing the image, but instead you’re sharing your personal modification of it. You create something new, text that imposes its own preferences, which may well clash with your reader’s.
Where I depart ways with DD is in her reaction to this phenomena. I have to ask myself, what does a blogger (or tumblr) owe his audience? Who are they posting for? In her post DD puts an open letter to tumblrs…
…if you try to fucking boss people around or tell us what we ought to like or do I am going to want to stab you in the jimmy, or vajayjay, respectively.
Please stop this deeply annoying shit and try to grow an awareness of something other than your own wank-bank.
Dishevelled Domina
But is there anything wrong with a tumblr being someone’s personal wank-bank? People blog for a lot of different reasons. I don’t write this one to get off, but that approach doesn’t have to be a universal one.
When I see an image and caption like this one, I don’t see it as an instruction for 50% of the planet’s population. Or even for the smaller fraction of dominant females. I see it as someone creating their own new little piece of erotica. It’s a fantasy snippet that, along with the image, tells a story they enjoy. It’s not particularly a story I care for, but the same could be said for a lot of the erotica out there.
I think in many ways the problem is actually a technical one. Tumblr makes it trivially easy to share and reblog images, but it drags all the comments along with it. It really needs better tools to slice, dice and mash the content as it flows between sites.
I’ll leave you with an image from the Superior Femme tumblr (originally by Frank Herholdt). This is a tumblr site whose images I like, but the captions often clash with my personal preferences. In this case the caption was “She’s taken his money, his family, his house. Now she’s working on his dignity.” That really doesn’t do much for me. We could go with “A real mistress will get her cuckold to paint her nails before she heads out for a night of fucking”, but then DD might come and stab me in the jimmy. So I’ll just say I like the coloration of the image, and his look of concentration. I’ll leave further interpretation to the viewer’s preferences.
I feel I should point out that I’ve never hurt anyone’s vajayjay and only eager and willing jimmys.
Also, just to be sure you appreciate my patience, I did not go off like a rocket after seeing ONE of these, it was a long, slow simmer that finally reached the pressure valve point.
What do we owe each other? I’m an idealist maybe, but I want the question to be, “What can we offer each other?”
I am doing those interviews with women right now and you wouldn’t believe the number of women who are somewhat Top-inclined but were scared off, or refused to acknowledge their dominant nature, because there is so much prescriptive bullshit drowning out the voices of reason and realistic welcome.
I think what we can offer each other is the support of similar interests and acceptance.
When vanilla sex is more empowering to women than exploring D/s as a dominants… something is off-kilter.
That tone of right way-ism is still strong in some corners of the web and I would love to see bdsm bloggers, Tumblrs, etc. etc. offer each other a hand of welcome rather than what seems to be a pointed, jabbing finger giving detailed instructions for something that doesn’t appeal to many of us.
Regarding the image you posted, I see something very different than “Superior Femme” but then I tend to read mutual respect and affection underlying the actions in D/s. He doesn’t look to me like a man losing his dignity, he looks like a man dignified by performing excellent service.
NOW, as for you… hmmm, you are in Seattle, right?
I may have to head downtown tomorrow and get my knife sharpened.
Ah, but who gets to define what the ‘right’ thing is to offer? What happens when what you want to be offered is in tension with what somebody else wants to be offered? Or create for that matter.
It’s funny that you mention ‘right way-ism’, because in many ways that was what I was reacting to in your post. The message of “you people are assholes for publishing your blogs this way, you should do it this way….” As I said in my post, I’m personally not a fan of these broad and sweeping statements on tumblr either. And I’m very happy to state my personal dislike and IMHO what impact it may have. I just get a little squirmy when that shades across into the “You’re doing it wrong” message.
Of course you’re reacting to them being (in your view) prescriptive. And I was reacting to what I saw a prescriptive in your post. And I did so by saying “You’re doing it wrong”. Pretty soon it turns entirely circular and we all disappear up our own orifices. In the meantime the original tumblr posts we both don’t like keep appearing regardless.
I agree with you about the ‘Superior Femme’ image. That’s pretty much exactly why I picked it. It was an image I liked, but the original caption didn’t at all match my underlying feelings. It had both a touch of sweetness and a touch of edge to it in my eyes.
And yes, I’m in the Seattle downtown area, and I know you’re around the region somewhere. But I’m afraid I never do edge knife play when I first meet someone. I have to have known them for at least an hour or two before the cutting starts. So no need to pull the blade out 🙂
Hi Paltego:
Lots of different themes going on here. I completely agree with what you and DD are saying about “right way-ism”. I feel very strongly that humans should ingest as much information about the scene as they desire then do what is right for them. For example the whole lock your man up and cuckold him thing would never work for Her Majesty and I for a whole host of reasons. I have been to a few sites where folks have tried to impose their views on me and I did not hang around long.
Love what DD said about BDSM blogger offering each other a hand of welcome. This is something I strive to do. She is also quite correct that women who have lots of dominant potential get turned off by how female domination gets portrayed. I would add that a lot of that is male fantasy super-imposing itself on female domination. You know the syndrome that says; “I will do anything to serve you as long as you make me serve you exactly how I want”. Unless you are a paying client the best approach is to lay the tools of dominance out before your lady love and ask her to choose which ones she likes best. There is always room for compromise.
Finally I have mixed feelings about tumblr. It sure is fun to see all those images I would have formerly had to pay for and download them to my computer. But when people start imposing specific text messages on them I get turned off. There are some exceptions.like Contemplating The Divine. Some of his stuff is great. Otto does a great job of modifying existing photos and making them into found art. Basically tumblr is a great big treasure trove of free wanking material and there is nothing wrong with that. I do worry about some of the sites that depend on image downloads for revenue. They may go the way of the dinosaur. I also can’t stand it when the tumblr host puts his own watermark on the images like he was the one who originally produced them. To me that seems very disingenuous
Hi hmp,
I probably should have been a bit clearer and nuanced in my post about exactly what kind of “right way-ism” I meant. I’m very much in agreement with what you say in general about not imposing views on others, and each relationship being very much unique. And I like the idea of bloggers offering each a hand of welcome and making positive contributions to the online community. But the “right way-ism” cuts both ways. Just because I don’t like a particularly style of blogging or posting, doesn’t mean I think it’s wrong to do that. And it’s not completely clear to me these tumblr posts really are prescriptive. Or at least not in the same way as someone writing long serious essays about ‘the one true way to do BDSM’ might be. See my other reply to DD for a little more detail.
As you say, some of it works for you and some of it doesn’t. I like Servitors stuff as well, even though he tends to do a fair amount of humiliation type stuff that normally isn’t my kink. But lacking any kind of universal black and white benchmark to divide things clearly into good and bad, I tend to want to default a mode of blog what the hell you like (but don’t mess with the watermarking!)
-paltego
Ok, and I’ve decided not to let this bit go,
I don’t think anything is wrong with someone’s Tumblr being their wank-bank. In fact, that is why I have one.
In fact, the ONE sentence you excised from my note to my fellow-Tumblrs made my position on that very clear.
I did not say people shouldn’t have a wank-bank; I said they should develop an awareness of something OUTSIDE it.
If someone is deeply opposed to dominant women then prescriptive right-way-ism is a great way to keep women at a distance, turn their interest other directions, and generally ensure that sexual domination remains as unattractive to the majority of women as possible.
If the people posting those sorts of captions have never had that thought cross their minds then they’ve pretty much proved the point I was trying to make.
Actually the bit I exercised (purely for reasons of brevity) seemed to me to be very clearly defining what was OK and not OK to post. Including that wouldn’t have changed anything about my post or basic point.
I think partly this comes down to how we perceive these tumblr posts. As I said in my post, I see them as little bits of new erotic content. The creator is spinning a fantasy and giving the image an erotic context he/she enjoys. When they say “Submissive men should always….” I don’t read that as ‘Paltego should always….”. I read that as “In my little fantasy I have around this image, men are always …..”
In the same way, if I wrote a short story that turned all the women of the world into cruel sadistic monsters, that doesn’t mean I’d really want that to happen. Or that all women should behave that way, even though the story portrayed them consistently that way.
As I’ve said, I share your dislike of these kind of posts. And I share your concern that they perhaps contribute to the climate that pushes potentially dominant women away. But it’s not 100% clear to me that the cost outweighs the obvious pleasure that some people take in these. After all the fact they get posted and reblogged enough to irritate you so much also indicates that a lot of people out there enjoy them. I’m pretty certain some of the fiction I write/read and the images I enjoy would be off-putting to a non-trivial number of people. I’m not sure I can go around basing my decisions on that.
I think it’s a great topic to raise as a ‘Have you considered the potential effect?” I’m just a little less convinced about the approach of “You shouldn’t do this. You’re a bunch of idiots and assholes and I want to stab you in the genitals”, amusing though that can be.