Twitter Troubles

My previous post on the future of twitter under Elon Musk was lost in the great migration. Short version: It was going to be chaotic and while he might not target kink and sex workers directly, there was a good chance they’d get caught up in the general chaos.

In hindsight that seems a decent bit of prognostication, although if I’m honest I did not expect the chaos to be quite as crazy as it is. His naïve views on content moderation  causing issues was predictable, but I didn’t expect him to be such a terrible CEO, technical leader and human being. There’s no ideal way to lay off a significant number of employees, but most people seem to manage it without coming across as incompetent emotionally unstable narcists. Not Elon. The story of Haraldur Thorleifsson, an ex-employee he mocked online encapsulates everything about Twitter 2.0. Incompetently handled, needlessly cruel, publicly embarrassing and potentially costly.

As for the actual product itself, changes to the curated timeline appear to be very sex and sex work negative. Twitter has always had a curated vs chronological option for browsing tweets. Under the old regime they tended to be different, but not wildly so. The curated version (called ‘For you’ in the current UI) had more popular tweets that got engagement over past days, but it was more a reshuffling of tweets than a radically different user experience. From my experience, that no longer seems  to be true. I can instantly tell when I’m on the ‘For you’ vs ‘Following’ view, as the content is so different.

Because I’m a bit of a nerd, I decided to try and measure the difference. I follow almost 500 people on twitter and only 20 of those accounts are not kink or sex related. With that kind of 95+ percentage skew, you’d expect my timeline to be full of awesome kinky goodness and that’s true for one of the options. Here’s what I measured for the ‘Following’ view when I categorized ~200 tweets the other night.

Category Percentage of Tweets
Non-kink related 8%
Kink related but non-explicit 43%
Explicit kinky content 38%
Explicit content selling (OnlyFan, etc.) 11%

That lines up with what I expect given who I follow. Now here’s the breakdown I for a similar number of tweets on the ‘For You’ view.

Category Percentage of Tweets
Non-kink related 45%
Kink related but non-explicit 20%
Explicit kinky content 8%
Clickbait bullshit 25%

You can see that the kinky material is massively down and the non-kinky stuff is way up. I even had to add a new category for clickbait tweets – the sort of deliberately rage inducing viral stuff that’s frequently incorrect and used to be a trademark of Facebook. Now I get more of those than I do from the actual people I’ve chosen to follow. That never used to be the case.

If someone was a huge baseball fan, and 95% of the accounts they followed were baseball related, I think it’d be seen as a massive product failure if 70% of the tweets they were shown were nothing to do with baseball. Yet that seems to be the current situation with the curated feed for twitter and kink/sex right now.

I’ll close the post with exactly the kind of content that Twitter now seems to be steering me away from. This is the incomparable Mistress Iris, as featured on her twitter feed.

You can see more of her amazing work at her Mindful Surrender site and via her OnlyFans.

The Temptation of the Taboo

The title of this Aero article isn’t great: Why You May Not Be as Kinky As You Think. I’m pretty certain that after several decades of exploring my kinky nooks and crannies, I’m exactly as kinky as I think. However, it does contain a few interesting snippets on the appeal of the taboo. The author researched the correlation between sexual fantasies and political affiliations…

I found that Democrats reported more fantasies featuring BDSM, including forced sex, than did Republicans, for whom power play is not quite so taboo.
…
Compared to Democrats, Republicans tend to face stronger moral prohibitions against things like non-monogamy and same-sex attraction, which means that fantasising about sex with more than one partner or having gay sex would be taboo. Guess what I found when I looked at Republicans’ sexual fantasies? Compared to Democrats, Republicans reported more fantasies about all kinds of non-monogamy, including infidelity, swinging, orgies and cuckolding…

That shouldn’t be too surprising for anyone who keeps an eye out for political scandals. You can be sure when a politician starts banging on about sexual matters they’re either cynically using it to distract from some other heinous shit they’re trying to pull or they’re heavily projecting their own desires and insecurities onto others. Often it’s both scenarios at once.

On the topic of taboo, here’s a particularly strong one that I’m always drawn to.

This is of course from Yapoo Market (specifically this tweet). It looks like an illustration either inspired by or the inspiration for this scene.

Scamtastic

One additional thought on the rise of AI text and image generators like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion: They’re going to be amazing tools for scammers.

There’s already a lot of fake domme’s floating around online. Mostly trying to catfish subs for money. They’re typically fairly easy to spot as they steal photographs (detectable via an image search) and run fast unsubtle shakedowns. That might change as better versions of these AI tools become freely available.

The image tools will allow them to easily generate unique content in specific settings. The text generators can handle DMs, emails and social media posts. With voice/face morphing the scammers could even take calls online. It’ll be possible to create fake personas that can interact fairly independently with their targets. With the right training they could even target particular kinks and fetishes. Will we need a ‘Pick every square that contains a naked submissive’ test for online dommes?

I’m a strong believer that anyone can be scammed if you can find the right script. Check out this fascinating article on the industrialization of internet scams if you doubt the kind of effort some people put into this stuff. It’s scary to imagine what’ll happen once these tools get into their hands.

This image is from the Stable Diffusion forum on Reddit.

Kinky Models

The hot story in tech over the last few months has been ChatGPT. The latest in large language AI models, trained across vast swathes of internet data, it has been freaking people out with it’s ability to do a pretty good impression of a person.

Inevitably there have been endless attempts to make it do naughty things because, you know, humans. The makers are constantly tweaking its guard rails but with millions of ingenious monkeys tapping away at it, not to mention all kinds of adult material in its training data, there are always going to be scenarios they’ve not covered.

The latest example comes from Vice magazine, where a journalist managed to get it to indulge in some Femdom roleplay. As you might expect if you’ve seen any of the other ChatGPT examples, it manages to be impressive, weird and unsettling all at once. It started pretty well, with mention of consent and safewords, but ultimately veered off into some far more disturbing areas. Which, in fairness, is pretty representative of kinky writing on the internet.

The writers final conclusion seems an odd one to me…

The practice of BDSM is firmly rooted in principles of consent. Will large language models ever be nuanced enough to differentiate between non-consensual acts and taboo—but consensual—situations in BDSM role-play? These models’ overall lack of rigid ethical principles highlights a major risk inherent to their design.

Rigid ethical principles are undoubtedly necessary once you start letting AI affect the physical world. Nobody wants a Femdom android that doesn’t understand consent. But for creative writing purposes? Pretty certain there’s a huge amount of online kinky fiction that violates all sorts of BDSM principles and we didn’t need ChatGPT to come up with it.

This image is by Rabbika. You can find there twitter account here.

House Boss

According to a study from China, attractive women wield more power in their households. Basically as their perceived attractiveness increased, so did the likelihood that they were the major decision maker.

It’s not too surprising a result. Repeated studies have shown that attractive people are generally treated better. Beauty helps if you’re trying to get a job or trying to get away with crime. It’s therefore not unreasonable that it’d also help you gain power in a household.

What I found interesting was this line at the end of the article.

It is also possible that interviewers saw wealthier women and those with more self-esteem as more beautiful.

The attractiveness rating was assigned by interviewers, so was obviously subjective. It might be the case that attractive people get more freedom to make decisions. But it also might be true that more forceful and dominant women are seen as more beautiful. What’s cause and what’s effect? Are bossy women perceived as more beautiful or do beautiful women get more opportunity to be bossy?

I’m not sure who this is or where the shot is from, but she certainly seems like someone who might be in charge of things. Or if not yet, soon will be.

Inspiration

I always enjoy shots like this one, where people have been inspired to recreate a kinky scene from art or from a magazine. For example, this previous post from all the back in 2013. They make me think of a chef doing a riff on someone else’s classic recipe.

In fact this’d probably make for a good game show, along the lines of Top Chef. However, instead of a kitchen and a few selected ingredients, contestants get a well equipped play space and a classic BDSM image to recreate. I’d love to watch a series featuring great dommes try to do their best possible recreation of a Sardax Milking Machine image or a classic John Willie bondage drawing in an hour or less.

I believe the domme here is the famous Amanda Wildefyre. You can find information about her sessions, playspace and onlines lessons on her professional site. 

The Scent of a Shoe

While the kinky interwebs are awash with pictures of men getting up close and personal with women’s shoes, I don’t feature a lot of those images here. I’m not a shoe fetishist and frankly, those images all begin to look pretty much alike to me. Here’s a happy exception to that rule. It’s one of the most sensuous shoe fetish shots I’ve seen. It’s helped a lot by the beautiful color tones and the contrasting materials – silk, satin, leather. Judging by the bulge in that little red dress, our model is enjoying the moment as well.

Image is sourced from this tweet. I believe the model is Enby Robot and the photograph was shot by Olivier Parent.

The Cramps

From one rock band that didn’t want to associate with kink to another that very much did – The Cramps. Pioneers of the psychobilly genre, they were clearly lovers of fetish, horror, sex, B movies and pop culture kitsch. You know. All the good stuff. Their guitarist Poison Ivy had worked as a Dominatrix and clearly has a love for fetishwear.

They recently had a moment in the mainstream, thanks to the Netflix show Wednesday and Jenna Ortega dancing to their song “Goo Goo Muck”. If you like that then there are plenty of Cramps song guides online. I’m partial to the overtly kinky Ultra Twist, off the album Flamejob.

Alternative Kinks

This story about the classic band called The Kinks made me smile. Apparently they’re getting annoyed with Twitter tagging tweets about them as ‘sensitive content’. Presumably Elon can’t tell the difference between a sexual proclivity and a 60 year old English rock band. Kind of incredible to think the band formed 43 years before the birth of Twitter. Social Media SEO wasn’t much of a thing in 1963.

I had to smile because I always have the opposite problem. I keep a Google alert on a few different Femdom related keyworks and it’s amazing how often I get notified about something related to the band. For a group that hasn’t release an album in 30 years they show up in my inbox with a surprising frequency.

The image is of another British band. This one from a different era and with a very different back catalogue – The Spice Girls. Personally I’d prefer to listen to The Kinks, but I have to hand it to the Spice Girls when it comes to visuals.

I believe this was taken on their reunion tour in 2007.

Screen Icon

Raquel Welch sadly passed away last week. She was a screen icon, whose face and fame almost everyone knew, even if they’d not seen her movies.

Her most famous image was of a cavewoman whose haircare and bikini technology was far in advance of its time. However, for the purposes of this blog, I thought the images below were more fitting. These are from the 1969 movie ‘The Magic Christian‘, taken with one of the leads – Ringo Starr. As far as I can tell it’s a truly terrible movie, which is kind of amazing given the talent involved. As well as Raquel, the cast includes Peter Sellers, Christopher Lee, Richard Attenborough, John Cleese and Graham Chapman. You can see a trailer here in all its 60s strangeness.

I’d say Ringo was either very brave or very foolish to let her try and whip a cigarette from his mouth. It doesn’t look like a fake movie whip. You can see a shot from the movie feature Raquel and the whip in action here.