KinkBNB

You may have heard of Airbnb, the service that facilities property rentals between private individuals. Well now there is KinkBNB, a service that lets you rent other kinksters play spaces. Renting a play space obviously isn’t a new idea, but I’m not aware of any service for coordinating the process. Typically you’d need to hunt around different pro-domme sites and forums to see what was available. It seems to be mostly Californian spaces at present, but if the concept takes off, maybe there’ll soon be spaces soon available in every town.

Of course while well equipped play spaces can be fun, you don’t actually need one to get kinky. This couple seem to be having a good time in what looks like a hotel room. Or at least one of them is having a good time. It’s a little hard to ascertain the attitude of the other one.

HotelRoom

Fetlife Fail

Fetlife has been in the news recently for all the wrong reasons. Somebody scraped a bunch of user data off it and published it on the open web. This wasn’t a hack. They simply created a normal free account, which just takes a few seconds, and then ran a script to browse the site and download user profiles accessible to all fetlife users. They claimed that this was to demonstrate the lack of security in Fetlife. That position was undermined somewhat by the fact that they only took data from female users under 30 years old and published it in a file called ‘The Fetlife Meatlist’.

Understandably this pissed a lot of people off leading to articles like this and this. While the person who did it is obviously an asshole, I can’t say I was particularly surprised. There have been numerous articles over the years highlighting this potential attack, as well as previous technical demonstrations of the approach. Of course that doesn’t much help the 99% of Fetlife users who are busy getting kinky rather than reading techy sex blog articles.

It’s tempting to say that you should expect anything published online to be public. That’s both true and missing the point. Privacy is not a binary concept. At one extreme you have things like password protected accounts for storing private cellphone photographs. At the other you have sites like reddit and blogs like this one. To access the former you need either a hacker or a security flaw in the storage system. To access the latter you just need a web browser and an internet connection. Neither provides guaranteed privacy, as a lot of celebrities recently found out. Yet expectations of the two are clearly different.

Social media sites like Fetlife and Facebook fall someone between those two extremes. The problem is that their business model of eyeballs and advertisers pulls them towards the openness of a reddit or a blog. The expectation of their users, particularly for a content sensitive site like Fetlife, pulls towards greater privacy and protection. To date it seems that Fetlife has biased towards its advertisers over its users. So yes, you should always work on the assumption that anything stored online may become public. But that doesn’t absolve Fetlife of the responsibility to strike the right balance between its business model and its users privacy.

In the meantime, if you do take kinky selfies, be careful how you share them. Although if anyone wants to send me some, I promise to be careful with them!

'Selfie' by Gracy GimpThis is by the Belgium artist Benoit Feroumont, who posts his erotic work under the handle Gracy Gimp.

Knot too kinky

It’s possible probable I’ve been spending too much time lurking on kinky sites. During my coffee break browsing today I stumbled on this article on useful knots, and was shocked that bondage wasn’t featured front and centre. I think I read through all 200+ comments looking for mentions of kink, and only spotted a couple. The fact I found the lack of kinky comments weird is perhaps a sign I should get out more. Maybe do some fishing, camping, climbing and sailing and use knots as God intended.

For those perverts out there like myself who have trouble picturing family friendly uses for a knot, this article on Rope Bondage 101 might be more interesting. It’s got a lot of great advice on materials, techniques, safety and of course knots.

Rope Bondage by David Lawrence
There are various cropped version of this image floating around on tumblr (where I found it originally). A bit of detective work led me to the original by the photographer David Lawrence. This is from his series Vertis.

Pick a number

It’s not femdom related, but I found this article on estimating the percentages of LGB people an interesting one. In most important ways the actual number is irrelevant. It’s clearly millions of people, so I’m not sure why different groups get so riled up over the exact count. It’s the historical and scientific perspective that I find interesting. One thing that comes through clearly from the article is the difficulty in giving a binary answer to what’s not a binary situation. There’s also clearly shifts in the numbers that reflect both changes in public identification and changes in actual behavior.

The precision of the wording in these kind of surveys always makes me smile. In this case I particularly liked the phrase – “someone with whom you have had any genital contact intended to achieve orgasm”. That’s a smooth line to use in a bar – “Fancy coming back to my place? I’ve got a box of Franzia in the fridge and a smooth jazz CD in the stereo. Maybe we could have some genital contact with the intention of achieving orgasm?”

I wonder if there was a line in the survey that would fit these two ladies? I’m not sure about genital contact or the intention to achieve orgasm, but there’s definitely something pretty kinky going on.

TwoOnHorseI believe the artist is Chéri Hérouard aka herric.

Why wasn’t I told?

I’ve just discovered that Sardax has both a twitter account and a blog. As you’d expect, both contain many interesting images and thoughts. I’m stunned I’ve only just discovered them. Clearly I’ve been failing in my duty as a resource for all fine things femdom.

A refresh of my links and resources pages is obviously in order. I’ve been debating putting together a set of twitter links, and this suggests such a list is overdue. While I ponder the right way to handle that, I’ll leave you with an image from Sardax’s blog of Mistress Lucy Khan. I played with Mistress Lucy only a few weeks ago, so this seems a fitting piece of artwork to feature here.

Mistress Lucy Khan by Sardax

Getting a good buzz going

Masochists come in all shapes and sizes. For example, I give you Dr Schmidt, inventor of the Schmidt Sting Pain Index which rates certain insects (hymenoptera) by the degree of pain their sting produces. Admittedly he’s an entomologist who studies these insects in the field, so getting stung is part of the job description. I also wouldn’t say that inventing a pain scale automatically makes you a masochist. If you’re a thoughtful scientist who gets stung that seems like a logical thing to do. I think the giveaway is the descriptions he gives the stings.

A Yellowjacket sting is apparently – “Hot and smoky, almost irreverent. Imagine W. C. Fields extinguishing a cigar on your tongue.” In contrast the Sweet Bee is – “Light, ephemeral, almost fruity. As if a tiny spark has singed a single hair on your arm.” Nobody can wrote those kind of descriptions without some appreciation for the pleasures of pain.

'Eaten Alive' by XRendererThe above image is by the artist XRenderer. From the pot she’s holding I’m guessing these are supposed to be honey bees. According to Dr Schmidt they feel “like a matchhead that flips off and burns on your skin.” I can’t imagine that can be too pleasant on a scrotum. Unless you like that kind of thing of course.

The good new days

After all these vintage art posts, let’s do something a bit more modern. I’m not sure where the image below is from originally, but I’d guess it’s a kink.com scene.

There’s a lot of valid criticism that can be directed towards today’s kinky pornography. However, no matter what its problems, I think it’s safe to say that it’s significantly better than what came before. Most vintage photographs look like they’re shot in someone’s front room with a model who has no idea what kink is. For example, I give you this or this. In contrast the shot below has an interesting setting, nice lighting, competent bondage and a sense that the lady concerned might actually know what to do with her new accessory. One can almost believe that the people arranging the shot might have a kinky bone or two in their body.

Modern Kink

Nights of Horror

While I’m on the subject of 50’s erotic art (as I was), I recently stumbled across this fascinating article on Joe Shuster. If that name’s not familiar to you then you’re probably not a comic books fan. Along with Jerry Siegel he was the co-creator of Superman. The story of how DC comics paid them $130 for the character and made millions of dollars while leaving the creators destitute is a well known one. What I hadn’t realized was the Joe Shuster went on to do fetish illustrations for a series called Nights of Horror.

The article is a lengthy one but well worth reading if you’re interested in modern American pop culture. It touches on comics, censorship, pornography, murder and the moral culture panics that seem to regularly spasm across the US. There’s also a book which covers the topic in more depth. The illustration below is both Shuster’s work and the cover from this book.

Shuster

Crossover

I believe the two images below are from a regular porn film, without a specific femdom slant. I found them via The New Superior Sex tumblr, and reverse image searching led me to this movie (warning youporn link that plays video with annoying music). I can’t say I’m a fan of the other tropes displayed on the youporn page (teen, thin, cutie, etc.) but I do like that it’s normalizing kinky play across regular porn. Blindfolds and bondage can be fun. It doesn’t have to be crazy cattleprods and whips on one side and random orifice stuffing on the other. Sex and sensuality works well with kink, and kink adds a nice edge to them in return.

Tied and gagged man being teased
Tied and gagged man being teased