Christmas Krampus

While the UK and US put a jolly and friendly Santa at the center of their Christmas celebrations, other parts of the world feature mythological creates with a touch more edge. For example, the Krampus from central Europe is a devilish male figure who beats misbehaving children with Birch rods.

As you might expect for a figure featuring corporal punishment and humiliation, there’s inevitably artwork of a kinky adult equivalent. In this case it’s a vintage German postcard of a female Krampus who beats badly behaved men. You can some more examples of the genre here. Doubtless they were aimed at adults who’d had childhood fantasies of Krampus beatings and couldn’t quite understand the strange thrill it had given them. Today it’d be fan artwork on a image forum. Back then it was saucy postcards.

The caption translates as ‘Greetings from the Krampus.’ I sourced this originally from this tweet by the Fake History Hunter.

We’re Back, Baby!

Eagle eyed readers may have spotted a few issues with this site over the last couple of weeks. At first it was flaky and randomly unresponsive. Then it fell over entirely. This was down to my old hosting company who  – and  I say this with no malice or hyperbole – turned out to be a useless shower of bastards. Multiple support tickets filed generated zero response, so I can only assume they’re about to go belly up and everyone competent has either been fired or quit.

Fortunately I managed to move the site to a new host who have been both responsive and amazingly helpful to date. Unfortunately, the only site back-up I had available to restore was from 2 years ago. Meaning that the last 2 years of posts  – around 350 of them – have vanished from the site. You’ll observe that the post previous to this one is dated from December 2020.  Potentially I could rebuild content using the Web Archive Site, but I suspect I’m just going to move forward from here. Life is too short to dwell on past screw-ups.

Apologies to everyone whose comments over the past two years have been lost. I promise to implement a better backup strategy moving forward. Hopefully normally blogging service should now be resumed. I’ll start this new era with an image from the artist Faun Songs. It features a young lady doing to a young man what I feel my old hosting company just did to me. Only without any lube, foreplay or happy smiles.

She’s Got the Look

If you asked 100 random people to describe the the look of a domme or dominatrix, what do you think they’d say? I’d guess a lot of their descriptions would mention accessories like leather, boots, whips, corsets, etc. Or they might bring up attitudes and expressions like being cold, cruel, aloof, icy, etc. However, what if you forced them to leave out anything about clothing, accessories and attitude? Is there a particular classic look or specific physical characteristics that would be frequently mentioned in our theoretical survey? Also, would it matter if the people surveyed were drawn from the general population or from the kink community?

I should add at this point that this question is nothing to do with how a domme should look. There’s obviously no right way for anyone to look, regardless of kinks, gender or sexual preference. I’m just curious about the stereotypes and cultural expectations we get implanted with. It was a topic that came up in a recent twitter thread with Miss Pearl and I thought I’d revisit it via the blog.

I’ll save my opinion on the question for the next post. For an image I wanted something that wouldn’t bias any comments, so here’s something with the submissive as the focus. I love the contrast between the tender kiss and the squeeze.

I’m afraid I don’t have the source for this image.

Porta Potty

While I’m on the theme of playspaces, here’s a particularly unique example from the yapoo folk. As far as I can tell from the images, it’s a toilet set-up inside a van. That’s certainly one way to get rid of your new car smell.

I’m intrigued to know who thought this up. Was it the sub? Were they thinking – ‘Getting pooped on is great, but you know what’d make it really hot? Doing it in traffic.’ Or was it a domme? Did they wait in line for a club bathroom one too many times and decide they’d create their own they could park outside? And can you valet it? If so, I hope they at least remember to crack a window.

Image sourced via this tweet. You can see more shots from the scene on the Yapoo site.

The Hits Keep on Coming

Last week Germany’s Studio Avalon announced it was closing after nearly 23 years. I’ve featured the space in past posts and visiting it was high on my kinky bucket list. Sadly for me and kinksters all over the world, it seems our opportunity has gone.

This week it’s the turn of NYC’s Parthenon. Queen Ariana Chevalier has announced that it’ll be closing at the end of the year. It has been a fixture of the BDSM scene in NYC for 17 years. I think the comments on the twitter thread and posts like this one from Vinyl Queen testify how widely used and appreciated the space was. I played their just once, visiting last year with Empress Wu, and would have loved to return.

I covered a fundraiser back in June for the Parthenon. Given its location in Manhattan, home to some of the richest people in the world, I find its closure particularly depressing. How many wealthy Wall St. types have had the balls crushed or backsides blistered inside that space? With the markets hitting record highs, could none of them step up to help out until the Covid vaccines come through next year? We’re going to return to ‘normal’ in 2021 and discover it’s going to take years to rebuild we lost in 2020.

This is Mistress Ariana Chevalier in an image sourced via this tweet.

Professor and Dominatrix

The Daily Beast has put up an interesting if somewhat depressing interview with a Mistress Snow. If that name is familiar, you might have seen an article she wrote last year in The Chronicle of Higher Education. That detailed her experience of working in academia as an adjunct professor while earning money as a pro-domme and what happened when she told her academic mentor about her sex work side gig. In short, her mentor reacted with horror and vindictively withdrew critical letters of recommendation. The Daily Beast article is a follow-up that provides more details on what happened and why a professor would need to earn money swinging a whip.

I initially described it as interesting but depressing, and re-reading it again only deepens that impression. It costs a ridiculous amount to go to college in the US and as a result there’s a terrible student debt problem. Yet adjunct professors, who make up over 50% of all US college professors, are earning an average of a little less than $24K a year. That’s less than a Starbucks barista and with much worse benefits. Yet when Mistress Snow supplements her income with a pro-domme gig, the tenured academic world reacts with horror and tries to screw her career. It takes a really special kind of system to rip-off both students and their teachers while punishing anyone who won’t conform to it. I think this quote from the article really highlights the craziness…

I make way more money per hour playing a professor in the dungeon than being one in real life.

Note this image is not of Mistress Snow. I don’t have an attribution, but I’d suspect it’s from one of the UK School Mistress themed sites.

Also I should point out that Mistress Snow of academia (twitter here) is not the same as Goddess Alexandra Snow (twitter and pro-site) or Snow Mercy (twitter and pro-site).

Tis the Season

In the US we just celebrated Thanksgiving. It’s an important event on the calendar. Reaching it can mean only one thing – time to start shopping for Christmas! While the turkey roasting pan is still soaking in the sink, people are already hitting the (online) stores for gifts.

For kinksters looking for gift ideas then let me steer you in the direction of this post by Miss Pearl. She has a number of fine suggestions from the domme perspective.

Alternatively, for fans of corporal play, I’d suggest a perusal of the London Tanners site. Daddy An Li recently received a number of their toys and enthused at length about them in this video stream. Their equipment looks to be particularly fearsome and of a high quality.

This is Daddy An Li with a heavy leather cane from the London Tanners. Image sourced via this tweet.

Note: Anything I mention or link to comes with zero benefit to me and zero guarantees. I don’t carry ads and I don’t use affiliate links. I’m just sharing what I find interesting.

Leading the Pack

This stylish dog walking shot is of Ms Aerys, as found via her twitter feed. It’s not immediately obvious at first glance, but there’s two ‘dogs’ at the end of the chain.

It reminds me a little of another of my favorite dog walking shots – this one with Mistress LucySweetKill. That also has a highly anonymized pupper, an elegant fetish attired domme and an abstract background. In Mistress Lucy’s case it’s obviously a photographers set, where I think this is the TD Centre building in Toronto. Both images present a great combination of glamour, fetish and objectification.

The photograph itself was taken by @TinyTaylorOakes and the submissives are @MrDexParker and @buttplugart. You can find more from Ms Aerys at her main site here. 

The Wrong Approach

There are plenty of online articles about how to introduce kink into a relationship. This AITA Reddit post, featuring a man behaving like a toddler in a supermarket,  reads like a great example of how not to do it. Admittedly, it’s not entirely clear if it is a kink thing. It could also be a mental health crisis. However, given he seems to be able to turn it on and off, only directs the infantile behavior towards his wife, and accused her of being judgmental about it, my guess would be it’s a very badly handled big / little kink. That’s a pretty specialized interest, and having a meltdown in a supermarket over a “CHOCWIT ICE CWEAM” is a non-optimal way to involve a partner in it. Although I guess it could be worse. He could have been demanding a diaper change.

This ABDL image is from the Allerted Universe whose Patreon you can find here.