Tag: Artwork

Dumb and Dumber

I’ve blogged about the stupidity of consent apps previously. The idea that you can swipe right to rubber stamp consent on a sexual encounter is a dangerous one. Firstly, it undermines the idea that consent is ongoing and always open to renegotiation or withdrawal. An agreement at minute one tells you nothing about what happened at minutes two through sixty. Secondly, an incapacitated or unwilling person could always be coerced to use the app, setting up a possible defense for an attacker.  On the flip-side, no jury is going to take the lack of a digitally signed consent as useful piece of evidence. After all, not using an app in the heat of the moment is standard behavior for 99.99% of people. So they clarify nothing, while working against potential victims and for potential attackers.

Of course there is no stupid technical solution that can’t somehow be made more stupid. Software people are inventive like that. In this case some Dutch tech-bro’s have managed to take the broken consent app concept and marry it with the latest tech craze – blockchain. For those that haven’t heard of this before, blockchain is the technical basis for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Personally, I’m a cynic on the current cryptocurrency craze, whilst still admiring the design of some of the underlying technology. However, in this particular case, it makes no sense. A decentralized design is logical when you want to avoid a single point of attack that governments and thieves can target to take control. Not so much when you’re tracking two people ticking a consent box. I can’t see the Russian hackers taking a break from social media and our elections to go after consent apps.

When it comes to negotiating consent, it’s always important to do it before the gag goes in. You can always renegotiate at anytime, but sometimes are definitely easier than others.

I’m afraid I’ve no source for this image.

Updated: Thanks to an eagle eyed reader I can attribute this to the artist xxxx52 who has a patreon site.

The Cully Flaug’d

Stumbling across this picture on twitter sent me off hunting for some background details, which led me to this British Museum page. The curator’s lengthy comment on it (click to ‘More’ to expand) are fascinating and also very British. The caption reads….

What Drudgery’s here, what Bridewell-like Correction!
To bring an Old Man, to an Insurrection.
Firk on Fair Lady, Flaug the Fumblers Thighs,
Without such Conjuring th’ Devil will not rise

I think the description of a man having difficulty getting it up as a ‘fumbler’ is a poetic but cutting one. I’m also going to be temped to describe my future erections as the ‘Devil Rising’.

According to the curator, the setting indicates a brothel or ‘flogging school’ and the coins behind indicate a service being paid for. Which I think means that this image, created sometime between 1674 and 1702, is one of the earliest of a pro-domme at work in her playspace. I guess we can be grateful that the fashion for portraying the domme as haughtily staring down at the viewer hadn’t yet caught on in 17th century femdom porn.

7 Sex Tips

Kinky sex tips from pro-dommes is a regular ‘go to’ for mainstream sites looking to attract clicks. They’re typically slapped together with little thought and I normally skip straight past them whenever they show up in my news feed. However, this one from the HuffPost, is actually pretty good. It features some of LA’s top pro-dommes, and the advice is both well written and well thought out.

I particularly like the suggestions by Mistress Iris to take orgasms off the table and not to be afraid to experiment and play around with roles. There’s no right way to explore kink and very little in life works out perfectly the first time you try it. Trial and error is part of life. Yet, with sex, we often get hung up on always achieving a specific sticky end result.

It might seem basic to some of my more jaded readers. But I find it’s often worth revisiting the basics. They’re important and easily forgotten.

This artwork, by the inimitable Sardax, is Mistress Georgia Payne, one of the dommes interviewed for the article.

Comments Finally Fixed (again)

The relationship between webmaster and website should be a D/s one. I issue clear instructions, and it should quietly and efficiently comply. Unfortunately, if my site is a submissive, it’s an exceptionally bratty one. My instructions are mere suggestions, and it never misses a chance to test my patience. Given the amount of time I spend tending to its needs, it’s possible I’m actually the submissive here.

Back in May last year I thought I’d finally fixed the issue of comments containing ‘naughty’ words getting blocked or failing to post. It turns out that at some point in the last few months, my site decided it’d delete all the fixes I’d made and reset the relevant files. I’ve no idea when that happened, and I apologize if any comments got eaten. I’ve now re-applied the changes, hopefully for good. So please feel free to leave comments on posts. They should go through without issues now. If do run into problems please email me and I’ll give the site a damn good thrashing (Basil style) for its impertinence.

Talking of comments, I have to give a shout out to Bacchus at ErosBlog for this amazing comment. I sometimes play amateur detective when trying to track down an image attribution, but he’s doing some Sherlock Holmes level shit to track a random image I found on tumblr to the clip it came from. Check out his Patreon if you’d like to utilize his mad skills for tracing interesting content that you care about.

I’ll finish with some artwork that’s easy to attribute. This is from Yumine Guo, producer of much fine femdom art. After all my tinkering with it today, I’m just hoping my webserver isn’t quietly thinking the same thing this lady is.

 

The Nympho Librarian

It’s not often that researching an image for a post takes me to a high culture site, but this would be that rare exception. The culture in question would be this article in the Paris Review, the original source would be this book and the image in question would be the one below.

I’ve no idea if the book is any good, but I did enjoy the article it was featured in. And I definitely enjoyed the image. Heaven is being topped by a half naked librarian wearing glasses and falling out of her lingerie while I’m hanging onto a good book we can read together afterwards.

The Goddess is Out

Top tip for the day: When emailing a ‘Goddess’ to ask her to arrange a ‘private’ (?) domme for you in your completely random bit of America, maybe check the relevant about page first. Or even just read a few posts on their site. It might turn out that your Goddess is a middle aged male submissive who knows fuck all about your part of the world. And even if they were a dominant female, and just happened to have a network of equally dominant friends spread across the US, why the hell would they send them in your direction?

I wonder if this kind of random bullshit happens in every aspect of life. Do German Porsche dealers get emails saying “Dear Mr Ferrari – How can this humble driver from rural Mississippi  get one of your sexy but highly unreliable Lamborghinis for free?” Or does Google get job applicants saying “Dear Microsoft – I’d love to work on your clever Facebook web site. PS. I have no software skills whatsoever.” I’m guessing not. Something about sex seems to short-circuit some peoples brains.

This is the Greek Goddess Artemis, known as Diana in the Roman pantheon. The artwork is by Michael C Hayes.

Say it with knives

I’ve always disliked Valentine’s Day. It seems designed to make singles feels lonely and couples feel like they aren’t romantic enough. Fortunately, I have friends who feel the same way, so I had dinner at their place this year,  playing many games of ‘tag you’re it’ with their children. Six year olds may be horribly cheaters when it comes to tag, but it was still better than being crammed into a restaurant and dealing with harried servers.

That said, being single at Valentines can sometimes work out. I remember visiting LA in February a few years back and being very puzzled how hard it was to get a dinner reservation. It wasn’t until I snagged one and arrived at the restaurant that I realized what day it was. I was the single solo male in sea of couples. The menu was 9 courses of shared plates, which the kitchen obviously couldn’t be bothered to re-portion for their one confused single. So they sent me what was literally dinner for two for half the price.  Then the next day I went and got my ass kicked by a fabulous domme. That turned out to be a pretty good Valentines.

This is from How to Kill Your Husband by Kathy Lette.

Good Cop, Bad Cop

For those who have been following the Kristen Hyman saga I have bad news – she lost her fight to become a cop.

For those of you who have no idea who I’m talking about, let me provide some context. Kristen Hyman briefly worked as a pro-domme and produced some femdom movies under the title Domina Nyx. I even featured an image of hers back in 2012. After quitting that career, she went on to train as a police officer. She was just days away from graduating when somebody blabbed about her past life and she was suspended. There was the standard sensationalist coverage in the press, with their usual hypocrisy of stigmatizing sex workers while using their stories to make money. Now, after spending significant time and money to qualify as a policewoman, she is out of a job.

I hadn’t covered the story up to this point because I was hoping she get re-instated and I didn’t want to add to the publicity on her past life. Now, with her name plastered across hundreds of tabloid articles and immortalized online, that seems kind of moot.

The reason I mention it at all, is to highlight the challenges sex workers face and the sacrifices they make. Society disparages their profession, criticizes their decisions and forces them to operate without the proper protection the law should provide. Then, even when they move onto jobs deemed more ‘worthy’ by society, the sex work they did can still be used as a cudgel against them. And why? Because they gave sexual pleasure to others while earning money for themselves and their families? How fucked up is that? They should be handing out medals, not blocking them from worthwhile careers.

The artwork is of course by the incomparable Eric Stanton.