Threads

My recent post on Meta was timely, given that they’ve just launched their new Twitter competitor, Threads. Thanks to Elon’s best efforts to run twitter into the ground, Mark Zuckerberg obviously see this an opportunity to spread his data grabbing tendrils even further.

I think it can only be seen as bad news for kinky people and sex workers who use social media. As I wrote before, Meta is famously anti-adult content. There’s zero chance that the kind of adult content I follow on Twitter is going to be allowed on Threads. Users and advertising dollars flowing to it, combined with Elon’s incompetent Twitter leadership,  could end up driving the only adult ‘friendly’ social media site out of business. The idea of Elon Musk losing a ton of money because of that is highly entertaining, but not so entertaining I think it’s worth losing Twitter over.

If you are thinking of signing up for Threads, be aware of the degree of data mining that Meta do. They’ll look at anything they can find – contacts, cell location, wifi networks, account data – to try and build their graph of the world. While you might want to keep kinky and vanilla accounts separate, their goal is to connect everything they can about you, which can lead to very bad outcomes.

To finish a gloomy post, let’s use a happier picture, featuring a very different kind of rope threads. This is from another social media site that fell on hard days – Tumblr. More specifically it’s from the Dudes in Distress tumblr, which is still around but hasn’t been updated in 6+ years.

Be Yourself

Podopheleus has written an excellent blog post on the importance of being true to yourself when sessioning with a pro-domme. Drawn from his own experiences and missteps, it has a bunch of good advice and is well worth a read.

My personal learning has been that it’s important to be clear in your own mind what aspects of the dynamic are negotiable and which aren’t. What you can’t negotiate you either need to make peace with or walk away from.

For example, the activities you do and the general dynamic of a scene should always be things you can discuss and adjust. If humiliation is a hard limit, then negotiate that up front. If a domme keeps sliding into that dynamic despite the discussed limit, it’s an easy call to walk away.

Where it gets trickier is around the more intangible elements – chemistry, style, intuition, empathy, etc. Those are things that you can’t negotiate. They’re an intrinsic part of a domme’s character and how she approaches her sessions. In a perfect word every submissive would be perfectly aligned with their dominant. In reality it’s a question of how much alignment there is and if you can live with the areas of misalignment. The mistake to avoid is being unhappy with parts of the dynamic, not recognizing those parts as being non-negotiable and then not being willing to walk away.

To pick a very prosaic example of my own: I played with a domme who took a pretty relaxed approach to timekeeping. I’m very punctual. She wasn’t. The first couple of times I was kept waiting for lengthy periods I was understandably annoyed. The third time it happened I realized that this was just how she conducted sessions. If I kept booking and kept getting annoyed by the same predictable behavior, that was then going to be on me, not her.  I didn’t think it was something I could bring up with her. She obviously knew she was late and didn’t particularly care. So either I needed to come to terms with that and enjoy all the other great elements of our sessions or I should stop scheduling sessions. Starting off every session in a bad mood because I’d been stuck killing time in a local cafe for 45 minutes wasn’t helping anyone.

I’ve no idea what kind of image would best illustrate the themes of the post, so here’s something simply fun any eye catching!

Happy 4th

I wish all my American readers a happy Independence day. Hope you all get to enjoy it in whatever fashion you choose to indulge. As a dual citizen of both the US and the UK, it’s a bit of an odd holiday for me. I’m basically celebrating independence from myself, which I guess make me a patriotic schizophreniac.

Fireworks and femdom don’t really go together (with occasional exceptions) so here’s the next closest thing – fireplay. This is Lady Lola with her pyro slave from this tweet.

Lady Lola in a London based pro-domme. You can find her professional site here.

Meta Muppets

I’m always amazed when I spot a sex worker or erotic content creator with an Instagram account. It has to be the least sex friendly social media site around. My feeds are frequently full of sex workers complaining about their accounts being killed with little to no warning. Recently they even had a burst of banning general sex positive accounts, that weren’t explicit or sex work related. Some of these got reversed, but I wouldn’t bet against future waves of similar bans. If you are using Instagram for anything adult related, it’s best to treat it as a throwaway that might be lost at anytime.

Mistress Estelle Leon is another recent casualty of the capricious Instagram algorithm. How stupid does a platform have to be to deliberately ban beautiful images like this one?

Mistress Estelle is a Melbourne based pro-domme. She may have lost her Instagram account, but you can still follow here on Twitter and visit her professional site here.

Bigger isn’t Better

As a fan of CBT I thought I knew most of the crazy things men can do, or have done, to their C’s and B’s. Turns out I was wrong. This ProPublica article is a an eye opening and wince inducing look at surgical penile enlargement. Some of the procedures it describes would have even hardcore CBT fans screaming ‘Red! Red!’ It’s really interesting, and very well written, but I can’t imagine any of the doctors featured will be too happy with it.

Personally I’ll stick to penis enlargement via painful procedures the old fashion way, no scalpel required. Just pinching, biting, slapping, whipping and flicking.

This is another old image I dug from a tumblr archive. It’s original from the Mean Dungeon site.

A Worried Look

I dug into the archives for this one. It’s from an old tumblr dump I took some years back. I’ve no idea who the original artist is, but it looks to be set in the 50’s, judging by their clothes and appearance. Inspired perhaps by the pulp novels of that time? I love their expressions. He looks worried. She looks both predatory and scornful. The clothes being neatly folded on the chair is another nice touch for setting the scene.

Ooh, Shiny!

A particularly fetishistic shot for today’s post. I don’t feature a lot of images like this one, but I do love the textures and composition of this example. It’s also a rare case where a collar on a domme doesn’t look at all out of place. It seems to be very much part of the outfit, rather than a random BDSM accessory.

I believe this is Master Trinity, a Miami based pro-domme with a particular love of latex. You can find her primary professional site here, Twitter here and OnlyFans here.

A Career in Pictures

I always enjoy when experienced pro-dommes post past images from earlier phases of their careers. It can be fascinating to see the evolution in their style, clothes and play spaces.

If you share my interest then I’d recommend browsing Domina M’s recent tweets. She’s been sharing some lovely shots from her 20+ year career. Regularly browsers of femdom material will probably recognize a number of them, as her work with Will Santillo (examples here and here) has been widely reposted. She’s also written about some of those early shoots here.

The image I’ve chosen below is a very early one from 2001 (tweeted here). It actually involves two legendary dommes. Obviously that’s Domina M herself in the shot, with her wardrobe and dungeon sourced from her mentor, Simone Justice.

Domina M is currently based in Paris and you can find her professional site here.

Mr. and Mrs. Stokes

This 1897 portrait, by the famous American artist John Sargent, is of a Mr. and Mrs. Stokes. It’s unusual for the era, with Edith Stokes front and center in casual street clothes, while her husband Newton takes a more passive background position.

I love the dynamic, with the wife full of life and confidence in the center, while he adopts a neutral, almost servant like position. The same dynamic and energy captured in a modern photograph wouldn’t look out of place on my femdom social media feed.

According to this article it was originally supposed to be a more traditional painting, featuring her in an evening gown standing alone near a small table.  It was Sargent’s idea to switch to street clothes and pose her petting a Great Dane.

But when the dog became unavailable the day Sargent went to fetch it, it was Newton himself who, as he writes, “had a sudden inspiration, and offered to assume the role of the Great Dane in the picture”

Given the dynamic of the picture, and the fact the husband was inspired to take the role of a dog / supporting accessory in the picture, one can’t help but wonder if there was a hint of femdom in their relationship. This article on the pictures expresses the view…

Newton was ahead of his time, confident and secure enough to be relegated to the literal shadow of his wife.

Which may well be true, but it might also be true that he actively enjoyed that role.