Lockdown (updated)

The rogue chastity device story was such a big one it feels like I should do a follow-up. It popped up all over the place. Something that the unfortunately trapped men will presumably not be doing anytime soon.

I may have been too optimistic about the ease of escaping the device, as I saw numerous online comments from people reporting being trapped for days. I guess in some ways that could be seen as selling point. Buy our device and you’ll be doing #locktober whether you like it or not.

Fortunately, there is a relatively easy escape route. Freddie Clegg’s humorous post on the subject linked me to this BBC article which suggests a screwdriver might be all that’s needed to escape. There’s a video for that trick on the companies site. The people who discovered the original flaws have another suggestion for escaping, described towards the bottom of this page.

As seems inevitable in any hacking story, Russians and bitcoin were also involved. Estelle Sinclair described an attempt to extort money from one of her submissives using the device. I guess if you imagine the Russian hacker as a icy cruel blonde Slavic lady, then that’d actually be kind of a hot scene. It’s just lucky the device didn’t come with a punishment setting capable of delivering electric shocks. That could have led to a few guys learning all about crypto-currencies in record time.

Finally, for anyone wanting a more serious deep dive into the issues here, the buttplug.io twitter feed has put up some lengthy threads on the topic. Worth checking out it you’re still intrigued by this kind of tech.

This is clearly a much more low-tech device that’s being inspected. I feel I should totally know the name of the two dommes in the image, but my brain is failing me. Hopefully a reader can help with the correct attribution.

Updated: Thanks to my ever knowledgeable readers I can attribute this to Lady Sophia Black and Ms Morrigan Hel.  I think it’s from a shoot for The English Mansion. 

Lockdown

I’m sure most readers have already seen the story featured in today’s post. It’s been covered in the tech press, the mainstream press and sex blogs. It even popped up on Colbert’s Late Show. Yet I feel I really couldn’t hold my head up high as a femdom sex blogger if I didn’t mention the Bluetooth enabled chastity device that has a horrible security flaw. Apparently during penetration testing (huh huh) security researchers discovered that attackers could take control of the lock, as well as scan for contacts and location information.

From the tech perspective, I think this is the kind of hacking story we should get used to seeing. It’s getting cheaper and cheaper to add this technology into products of all types. There are lots of small companies springing up making specialized internet enabled devices and security is hard to get right and hard for end users to understand. That inevitably makes it a low priority for the manufacturers.

From the sex perspective, there seems to be a bit of a disconnect between the reporting and what chastity device users normally say. The mainstream articles suggests you might require heavy duty angle grinders to escape. What I’ve read in the past from chastity device users is that pretty much any device is removable if it doesn’t involve a piercing. Give it enough lube and wiggling and the male genitals are capable of  Houdini-esque feats of escape.

This drawing – featuring a far more traditional device – is by The Smutty Rogue.

Oxymoron?

Writing my last post raised a question for me: Is it ever possible to do a consensual blackmail scene? Isn’t it actually an impossibility?

Consensual blackmail is clearly a well established niche in findomme play. The domme gets hold of embarrassing material, either directly from the submissive or by creating it from their interactions, and uses it to threaten the submissive. It might be used as a one-off scene or part of an ongoing dynamic involving regular payment.

The thing that makes me question the consensual element isn’t the role of the domme or the submissive. It’s the need for a third party. Pretty much by definition there must be someone who’d be shocked by the material exposed. Blackmail isn’t effective because of the dynamic between the blackmailer and blackmailee. It works because it leverages the relationship between the blackmailee and the other people in their life. If they don’t care, there is no leverage. But if they do care, then how is this ever consensual? The need for shock and offense seems an intrinsic part of the recipe.

I guess you could roleplay the idea of exposing the information, with both parties agreeing that the final step would never be taken. However, that doesn’t typically seem to be how these things play out. It’d certainly drain a lot of energy out of the scene. Roleplay typically focuses on the context and setting for the scene, not the execution. A teacher/student scene is a roleplay, but the beating is still real.

This artwork is by Lera Balashova, found on her Dribble site.

Financial Blackmail

This post gives me an opportunity to pull together two of my recent themes – technology and financial domination. My path to this unholy union is via this Vice article on Mistress Harley. She’s a self-proclaimed Techdomme, dominating her clients via their dataspace. The information she gleans then feeds into kinks around humiliation, shame and consensual blackmail. Financial domination with a very sharp edge.

Personally, that kind of play scares the hell out of me, and not in a sexy way. It seems like extreme edge play. My data and computers are extensions of my brain and thoughts. Letting someone loose in them would feel like handing a amateur surgeon an ice pick and tell them to have a rummage in my perfrontal cortex. That’s not to kink shame, it’s just a very definite case of YKINMKBYKIOK.

That said, there are parts of the article that don’t seem quite so OK.

“I’ve definitely exposed people. I’ve posted dirty pictures of them on their Facebook or I’ve posted ‘I have a hot internet mistress’ along with a picture of myself.”

She’s also faked mental breakdowns on client’s profiles. She just starts with a simple post of “I’m not feeling well,” and as people respond in real time she begins to escalate up to something resembling schizophrenia.

That seems to violate rules around consent. Her client might have been OK with it, but what about the friends and family that see the pictures or get dragged into a fake  mental breakdown? Social media drama is bad enough, without later discovering that your friend is getting off on involving you in their fictional kinky storylines. Although if you begin to think about social media as being one huge humiliation scene, that does make a kind of sense.

If you are into financial and technical domination then Mistress Harley is clearly an expert. You can find her main site here, where she offers a wide variety of clips, customs and findomme options.

Shiny New Server

Welcome to the new server, same as the old server (hopefully). Migration has completed to the new set-up, but it should all look exactly the same to anyone reading. I lost one post in the process, but since that was just about starting serving migration, that’s no big deal. If you encounter any site issues, particular around comments, then please let me know. I think I’ve got everything configured correctly but it’s hard to be 100% sure.

As an aside, I think it’s amazing any of this stuff ever works at all. If you’re just browsing the web it all seems pretty solid, but under the covers there’s a hell of a lot of duct tape and bailing twine. This site runs on top of WordPress, which is a fairly complex piece of software. On top of that is a bunch of plugins, themes and widgets, all written by different people. WordPress itself is built on a bunch of other software products, like Apache, PHP, SQL, Perl, etc. A lot of those have their own plugins and customized tools, along with the UI that allows them to be configured. Underneath it all is the server itself (running a flavor of Linux) along with the various internet technologies like DNS, SSL, TCP, etc. that lets everything talk together. Everyone of these critical pieces is available in different versions, and almost every website you visit will be running all of them in some different combination of versions. Yet it incredibly all works, as shown by the fact your reading this.

The internet is arguable mankinds greatest achievement and certainly its most complex machine. The software that delivers this post to the screen of a smartphone has thousands of PhDs and millions of man hours of development behind it. And yet, here’s me using it to deliver sexy pictures of kinky people. I can’t think of a better use for all that time and effort.

I believe this particular sexy picture is of Skin Diamond shooting for Divine Bitches.

Mistress Blunt and her finsub

I’m continuing the financial domination theme by linking to this article by Mistress Blunt. It features a lengthy interview with her female financial submissive. That combination of a professional domme, a female submissive and a findomme kink is pretty rare.

I really enjoyed the way the interview unfolded, and their dynamic comes across as both very hot and cute. It really captures the appeal of financial domination, even for those not into it. However, the intensity of the play did make me a little uncomfortable, particularly given that it only started this year (based on comments in the interview). I’m guessing the submissive is a young professional, in a career with a high earnings growth potential. I really hope she doesn’t do anything to cause her future self to curse the foolishness of youth.

I was lucky enough to find myself in a similar position in my career when I moved to the US. In hindsight, there are a lot of things that make me want to reach back in time and slap some sense into the younger me, but fortunately money management isn’t one of them. I always split my finances into essential (food, rent, etc.), discretionary (luxuries, trips, etc.) and investment (saving for retirement). One thing I did right was to be strict about funding my kinky fun purely from the discretionary bucket. Obviously I was hugely privileged and lucky to be able to fund all three, but I’m very glad now that I kept that distinction. I don’t have a financial domination kink, but it would have been very easy to have gone wild splurging on multi-day multi-domme play and lengthy kinky foreign trips.

For me it’s important to always treat professional kinky interactions as a luxury item. That’s not to say kink itself is optional, but paying for it with a professional certainly is. I imagine that it becomes a lot harder to maintain that kind of distinction when your kinks are intimately bound up with money and how its distributed. I can only hope the finsub in question can picture a conversation with her future self and ensure she’s careful to make it a happy one.

This is the beautiful Mistress Blunt, in an image from her gallery page. She’s a NYC based pro-domme whose professional site can be found here and her twitter feed here.

Fin Domme from his Perspective

After my previous post on the The Simp, pivoting to talk about financial domination seems the right move. It’s both the exact opposite and the kind of thing that would really annoy anyone who subscribes to the simp idea. So goodness all around.

I’ve seen a lot of fin domme writing from the domme perspective, but not so much from the submissive side. I therefore enjoyed this Girl on the Net guest post, written by Harley, owner of Harlequin Works. It’s a nice clear take on why financial domination works for him.

I personally find financial domination fascinating because it’s not my kink, yet I often find descriptions of it to be very hot. To draw a very weird comparison – it’s a bit like enemas. I find them to be unpleasant and non-sexy in reality, while being very hot in the written word. I similarly find the enthusiasm of fin domme’s and their submissives to be very sexy, while having zero desire to part with my cash. Is voyeuristic enjoyment of fin domme a kink in itself?

I’m not sure where this image originally comes from (I found it here), but there’s definitely a fin domme storyline that can be spun from it if you’re that way inclined.

The Simp

Internet culture has thrown-up (and I think that’s exactly the right phrase) yet another odd concept – simping. As far as I can tell, from articles like this one, a simp is a man who offers a woman time, attention, money or respect, without getting a ‘sufficient’ recompense.

It’s obviously an idea deeply rooted in misogyny and entitlement,  with heavy incel vibes. Of course those characteristics means that, rather than dying quietly and alone in a forgotten corner of the internet, it has been spread far and wide. This month is apparently ‘No Simp September’, where one of the rules is don’t give money to sex workers.

The whole thing is deeply unpleasant, but the logic of that last bit baffles me. If you’re upset about not getting a return on time or money invested, isn’t the more transactional nature of sex work exactly what you want? Sex workers are typically very clear about the services they offer and you’ll definitely get the chat time or pictures or custom clips or whatever you’ve agreed. Negotiation and mutual agreement on the transaction is baked into the process. I’m certainly not suggesting sex workers should have to put up with douches who believe in this kind of shit, but the inherent logic of their position seems bizarre to me.

I guess when it comes to male entitlement in online cultures I shouldn’t be too surprised that Mr. Logic is no longer home. I suspect in this case Mr Logic has not only left home, but he’s boarded it up, sold all his possessions and is currently living as a end-times prepper in Idaho under the name Captain Beefkillington the Third.

This clearly isn’t a simp in action. She’s very kindly beating and humiliating him in exchange for all those gifts. That seems like a very fair return. The excellent artwork is – of course – by the always amazing Sardax.

Looking Forward

A ten year anniversary seems like the perfect moment to a cast an eye to the future. What should I do with this site for the next decade? What exciting developments will be heading your way? Sadly, I have absolutely no idea.

Most blogs seem to peter out when their creators feel they’ve nothing new to say. The mixture of posts I use tends to reduce the risk of that. Occasionally personal posts are greatly outnumbered by those focusing on hot images, site links, funny articles, mainstream kinky coverage, etc. If I’d stuck to purely personal material I think I’d have been lucky to make it to year one, let alone year ten.

Given that flexibility of format and the vastness of the kinky world, I’m unlikely to run out of material. That makes my free time and interest level the primary limiting factors. The future of those two is hard to predict. I’m hoping that in the next few years I can retire early and create space for personal projects and travel. Maybe that’ll free up more time for kinky adventures and provide much blogging inspiration. Alternatively, maybe new projects will suck up my time and force me to make some hard choices about where I spend it. Hopefully, I’ll be able to find a good balance.

In the meantime, barring technical disasters or unexpected life events, I’ve no plans to change what I’m doing here. However, if reader’s have any great suggestions or things they’d like to see, then feel free to let me know via a comment. I make no promises to adopt anything suggested, but I’m always open to new ideas or possible improvements.

I’ll leave you with a vision of the future from the movie Starcrash. This is Stellar Star – the best astro-pilot in the whole universe – as played by Caroline Munro. She’s the one on the right, sporting the standard pilot outfit of the future.

Looking Back

After a decade of blogging I thought it might be interesting to look back and see what has changed.

The obvious answer is that there are a lot less bloggers. I love and appreciate the people on my blogroll, but social media has sucked in a lot of people’s attention and creative output. That in turn has created some interesting knock on effects. When I started blogging I posted and linked to a lot of debates around femdom. They were centered on topics like the invisibility of the domme  in society, the negative perception of submissives, the distorting effect of professional dominance, cliches in femdom porn, etc. Sadly, I’m not sure we’ve improved from a cultural perspective in those areas, but there is less writing about those issues. I think the angst about it has moved to social media and that’s a far more ephemeral medium. It’s hard to capture a serious debate in 240 characters or less, particularly when they’re randomly mashed into a stream of thoughts from dozens of other people.

Another change has been a reduction in curated image and artwork sites. Artists and their fans used to create dedicated sites to collect artwork. Kinky porn companies used to shoot a lot of still imagery and publish galleries from scenes. Now most artists and fans publish via social media and kinky porn tends to focus on video only clips. For someone like myself, with a minor fetish for archiving and collating material, it’s somewhat frustrating. I’ve been less compelled to update my resource links, because there is less ‘permanent’ content to link to.

When I started blogging it felt like the dominant model of the internet was a library that anyone could donate a book to. Now it feels more like a big party house with endlessly swirling conversations, a lot of which feature bad faith actors and paid for guests. Much as I enjoy things like Twitter and Reddit, it doesn’t feel like a healthy change. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go and yell at some kids to get off my lawn.

Birthday celebrations should usually be accompanied by cake, so here’s Lucy SweetKill serving one up. I’m not sure this approach is one Emily Post would recommend, but it works for me. Fittingly enough, given the contents of this post, I found this on twitter, via Lucy’s feed. It was photographed by JCPhotoMedia.