What a lovely canoe

I’ve written about some of America’s crazy cultural issues in the last couple of posts, but it’s not alone in having some strange attitudes. All countries have odd cultural baggage when it comes to sexuality and gender. The latest example from Japan would be this story of an artist and her vagina canoe.

As any porn aficionado will tell you, Japan has odd laws around pornography and obscenity. Japanese producers create some fairly extreme (to Western eyes) material, but the genitals must be obscured. Artist Megumi Igarashi pushed this law to the point of absurdity by distributing the data that would allow someone to ‘print’ a 3D model of her vagina. She did so to help fund a canoe also modeled on her body.  Amazingly, for distributing what’s basically a mathematical description of part of her own body, she was found guilty of obscenity and fined 400,000 Yen (about $3,680). The problem with pointing out the absurdity of a law is that after you’re done with the absurdity the law bit is still there. One can only hope that the sheer ridiculousness of the ruling may provoke a change.

Past artists have worked around the censorship laws with strategically placed objects. Mike Myers had fun with that approach in this Austin Powers clip. Namio Harukawa was a little subtler in the image below.

Namio Harukawa artwork

The silver lining

If there’s one upside to the recent clusterfuck of the battle for bathrooms (see my previous post) it’s the response it has provoked in mainstream America. Ten years ago it would have been a fringe issue. Not anymore.

When artists like Pearl Jam, Boston and Bruce Springsteen cancel concerts then it’s easy for conservatives to dismiss them as part of the liberal elite. When Deutsche Bank and PayPal start cancelling investments then it’s harder to make that claim. And when major employers in the area like Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Target start speaking out in favor of transgender rights, then it’s pretty clear where the mood of the mainstream is. Of course that doesn’t help individuals caught in the current crossfire of discrimination, but it at least suggests that the world is trending in the right direction. One can only hope the trend is an accelerating one.

In the meantime let’s support people using the bathroom in whatever manner is most appropriate. If that means peeing on a naked consenting man, then so much the better.

PeeI’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for this image.

Taking a tinkle

I like the United States. I’ve enjoyed living here and I can’t see myself leaving. Yet, despite the fact I’ve been here over 15 years, it can sometimes still feel like a very foreign place. The so called culture wars rage here with an intensity and strangeness that doesn’t seem to exist in Western Europe. There are some toxic topics here – abortion, guns, goverment regulation, religion in public life –  that are unique to the history of the place. You can live here for years and not understand why they create such passionate debate.

Occasionally these culture wars wage a battle by strange proxies. The latest example of this is the public bathroom. Having failed to stop gay people have sex and get married, some conservatives have decided to draw the line at transgender people using the bathroom. Fighting for such a ridiculous cause is perhaps indicative of the desperation of their position, but that doesn’t stop it being any less harmful to transgender people.

Vox has a good article on the history of this and how it’s being used as way to generally attack LGBT rights. John Oliver also did his usual excellent job of demolishing some of the bullshit arguments involved here. Although perhaps my favorite piece of political activism comes from Shakina Nayfack who is touring North Carolina (current epicenter of the battle) and peeing in a lot of urinals.

Of course other countries have their issues with bathrooms as well. For example, based on this image, it looks like Japan has an issue with men getting trapped in ladies toilets. I just hope she spots him before it’s too late. Otherwise the poor chap might get awfully wet.

BathroomThis is from the Team Rinryu site.

A Genoux Esclave

A final post (for the moment) with a vintage femdom artwork theme. This is from a 1935 book – ‘Jim Galding. A Genoux Esclave. Les Editions du Couvre-Feu.‘ The title means ‘Kneeling Slave’, although in this particular illustration it’s more of a lying slave and a hop, skip and a jumping domme.

The artist went by the handle Wighead and there’s more excellent artwork and some discussion on his or her identity here.

a-genoux-esclave-les-editions-du-couvre-feu-wighead_0018

A simple sketch

Continuing my theme of artwork from the early part of the 20th century, here’s something 20 years on from my last post, but very different in style. The best reference I have for it credits it as “Bruno Schulz IV: Frau mit Peitsche vor kniendem Mann (Woman with whip in front of a kneeling man), around 1937”

The artist was a writer, literary critic and art teacher. He was also, based on this and other drawings, clearly a submissive and masochist. Sadly he was shot and killed by a Nazi in 1942.

BrunoSchulzThanks to my reader Marga for pointing me at this image. She described it as raw, visceral and honest, and I have to agree with that. There’s also a sense of spontaneity to it. It’s a drawing, but almost feels like a candid photograph.

Vintage femdom

After all this talk of the perils of modern technology I thought a change of pace was called for. This is from the era when all a gentleman had to worry about his housekeeper finding his erotic etchings hidden at the bottom of his study desk drawer. This is entitled ‘Mistress and Slave’ and dates from between 1910 and 1920. The telephone had been invented by that time, but we were still about 60 years away from the internet and 80 years from the smartphone.

MistressAndSlaveI found this via the History of BDSM tumblr.

Suggestion stupidity

I couldn’t write a series of posts on technology and femdom without touching on the stupidity of auto-suggest. If there’s a single thing that bugs me about web search and browsers, it would be this.

On the one hand, my phone’s web browser is incredibly keen to suggest this site. I just have to type ‘f’ into the address bar and it pops this site up as an option. That can make it a touch nerve wracking when I’m out in a bar and someone borrows my phone to look at something. Pretty much any adult site I’ve visited can pop up based on just a single letter entered into the address bar.

On the other hand, Google’s search suggestions are incredible prudish. I can type ‘femdom’ into the search box and it still will not give me any query suggestions. At that point, what does it think I’m looking for? Who is going to accidentally type ‘femdom’ in and get upset at the suggestions that might pop up? There’s not a lot of ambiguity there. Similarly, its image search really resists showing porn. Searching for ‘domme‘ returns medieval architecture and ‘spanking‘ returns a lot of images of children being hit.

All this means that in some cases a single letter is enough to trigger a porn site prompt, and in others a very precise and unambiguous query fails to trigger it. Good job tech companies. That’s a spectacularly bad job of understanding user intent.

SmilingSelfieThe image is another example of a sexy cellphone selfie. I’m afraid I don’t know who created it.

Information leakage

The nightmarish situation I described in my previous post – a work presentation featuring porn of yours truly – is (hopefully) unlikely to happen in real life. I keep a religious separation between my work laptop and my personal one that I use for posts like this. I also maintain very separate email identities, including one for work, one for my personal life and one for this blog. However, despite all that, it can sometimes be difficult to stop all information leakage. Technology companies have a vested interested in gathering information about you and connecting it together. The greater the number of datapoints they can correlate the more valuable that information is. Information = power = $1bn IPO.

I think the biggest risk at present is smart phones. They’re a nexus where many different streams of identities can meet. People may differentiate between work and home computers, but they don’t always do the same thing for the computer in their pocket. Which means software on it can potentially access your location, all your email accounts, all your phone records, all your text messages and all your social media. It’s typically possible to configure it not to do that, but technology companies have a vested interest in the information, so configuration defaults tend to be permissive in the data they expose.

My scariest information leak was due to my phone. I’d been using it to snap session photographs. It had also been set-up to access my personal email account and, unbeknownst to me, that meant it would also automatically upload photographs to a private storage space in the cloud. Nobody could see them, so in theory no big deal, right up to the moment I added that email account to a new work laptop. I didn’t think there was any danger because it wasn’t an account I used for anything blog, porn or BDSM related. It was just for chatting to friends and shopping online. But now there was a path for information to leak along. The final step in that path was a screensaver on the laptop that would rotate through photographs from your online photo albums. You can probably imagine what happened next. Luckily I was just chatting to a couple of people in my office when naked me appeared on the screen. I had chance to quickly shut the lid before anyone spotted anything. If I’d been projecting onto a big screen in a meeting it could have been a career limiting moment.

I’ll leave you with a couple capturing their own personal moment via their phone. Hopefully the leakage of this photograph onto the net was intentional.

Selfie

Presentation anxiety

Last week at work was a busy one for me. Most of it was spent preparing a presentation for a senior company executive on Friday afternoon. This process wasn’t helped by a very vivid dream I had on the Thursday night featuring a powerpoint deck that started with an image of me being fisted. It was a slow motion car crash of a dream. Nobody in the meeting appeared to notice what had flashed up, but I somehow couldn’t get the laptop to advance to the next slide. There’s a close-up of my naked ass and a lady’s wrist up on a big screen, but everyone’s still making pre-meeting small talk while I frantically hammer at the keyboard. The sense of dread that would someone notice before I could fix it was intense.

In the event the actual presentation went fine. No fisting or naked me was involved. However, I did check and re-check the presentation at least 6 or 7 times before sending it out. I’m not sure whether the dream was a simple presentation anxiety about being unprepared or a deeper one about about the real me being ‘found out’. Possibly it was the latter manifesting itself via the stress of the former.

femdom-anal-fisting-2
femdom-anal-fisting-6These two images are from the Kinky Mistresses site. She looks to be having fun with the situation.

O Face

Here’s an image of a lady with a great facial expression. I guess he’s doing something right. I wonder if the nipple pulling is just for added encouragement or a subtle way to control the stimulation? Maybe he’s like an old radio. You twiddle the knobs, mash the buttons and bang on the side, and eventually you get something you like out of it.

OFace