Bondage – Page 43 – Femdom Resource

William Saletan on BDSM (again)

Regular readers may remember this previous post critiquing William Saletan’s BDSM articles at Slate. His latest offering is considerably better that his past efforts, but that’s not exactly a high bar to aim over. There’s actually some real data in this new article, although his thinking remains flabby and his reasoning haphazard.

He doesn’t seem to understand common activities like piercing or electrical play, or when tools like safewords might be needed, and therefore makes foolish sweeping statements. He correctly states that BDSM participants are not a single homogeneous group, but finishes with a set of conclusions that implies they are. I also think his concerns about exploitation based on the gender percentages in the top/bottom roles makes no sense in the framework he presents them. However, I’m going to ignore all that, and instead talk about a single issue he raises: Is BDSM an orientation?

This is a hot button topic for some kinky people, who get quite passionate about it. He implies it’s not because some fraction of people only dabble in kink. Personally I think the whole discussion is a red herring.

The people who argue that it is an orientation often seem to draw from, or adopt similar arguments to, some of the recent debates on gay rights. The religious right would argue that being gay was a choice and therefore gay people were choosing to give up their right to marry. Presumably they thought that people were being gay just to spite them. The obvious counter argument was that homosexuality was an intrinsic part of someone’s identity, and it was therefore unfair to penalize someone for something they had no control over.

I think getting dragged into that kind of discussion misses the point on two counts. Firstly, when you’re dealing with prejudice and bigotry, any apparently logical argument offered is really just a smokescreen. If you knock it down they’ll simply move on to another. The color of someone’s skin is clearly intrinsic to a person, but that didn’t stop society withholding civil rights from minority groups for many years. They simply picked a different reason to do so. Secondly, there are plenty of examples of society protecting the rights of groups that are the result of choice. For example, nobody pops out of the womb with a specific religious affiliation, despite what some religions may claim. Yet religious freedom is something society chooses to legally protect.

Rather than arguing that particular groups are special, we should be arguing for a culture that has a strong bias to protect people’s rights to live their lives as they see fit. And if you’re going to claim that their freedom to do so harms you in some way, then that had better be some clearly provable harm that we’re talking about. Not just that you think it’s icky to have a co-worker who might be into BDSM. Or that you think there’s some risky but undefinable moral hazard to having kinky people bring children up.

I wasn’t really sure what photograph was suitable for accompanying this post, so I thought I’d simply continue the medieval theme from yesterday. Mr Saletan seemed particularly concerned about knife play. I wonder what he’d make of bloody big sword play?

The image is by the photographer Jerrell Edwards (also on deviant art). I found it on Thy Queendom Come, Thy Will Be Done tumblr.

Lose Control

I was happy to notice the Lunar Black tumblr had recently sprung back into life. That is against the typical sequence of events for tumblrs. They typically either grind to an indefinite halt or vanish into thin air without so much as a by-your-leave. There are not a huge number of artwork themed femdom tumblrs, so I’m glad we didn’t lose this one.

The image below is by the artist sadademort (free deviant art login required) and is called ‘Lose Control’. I discovered it via this post on the aforementioned Lunar Black tumblr. I’m not sure that arm bondage is strictly up to code, but I do like the energy and sense of the D/s dynamic that it captures.

How about a kiddie pool and a lama?

I was highly entertained by this short animated film featuring a particularly hapless ‘submissive’. He manages to provide an excellent example of two particularly annoying traits. There’s the excessive use of honorifics and what I like to think of as Meat Loaf syndrome – ‘I’ll do anything for you….but not that‘.

When it comes to honorifics I tend to veer strongly in the other direction, and omit them unless it’s really clear that I shouldn’t. Partly that’s down to playing a lot with Lydia. She’s not big on protocol and formality. I don’t think I’ve ever called her ‘Mistress’ in a scene and that has conditioned me for when I play with other people. It’s also partly because using formal honorifics doesn’t do much for me. I’m happy to address people however they desire, but I don’t get a buzz out of using a formal title. Perhaps in a more structured and personal D/s relationship it’d make more sense, but for casual play I tend to default to first names unless I’m told otherwise.

For online interaction I like the advice in this thread from Mistress Lilyana. Adopt the username that you’d like to be called. And, the logical inverse of that, call people (at least to start with) by whatever username they publish. That makes life simple.

The image is from Mistress Lilyana’s tumblr. My internet sleuthing tells me it’s by the German photographer Robert Recker and is from a sequence simply called Hotel Room.

Oh, and if anyone’s wondering about the post title, you need to listen closely to what the guy in the animated clip is really into.

In the bedroom

Today’s artwork is a very different style to yesterday’s, but it’s no less striking. It’s entitled ‘In the bedroom‘ and is by the artist zblabla.

I like the ambiguity of the scene. Is this the start of a scene or the end of one? Is she going to leave him there while she sleeps? Is he purely ornamental or a fun toy for her to play with? You also get the impression our uncertainty is shared by the man on the X-frame. Now he’s fastened in place, he’s not quite sure what she’s planning.

I found this on the Femdom Gallery tumblr.

Happy

It has been a generally happy day for me. First, the Supreme Court struck down DOMA and dismissed the appeal on prop 8. Plus there was the added bonus of watching Scalia rage impotently. Then I got to enjoy a lot of needles and kite twine with Lydia. Finally, basking in a wave of endorphins, I cracked open some good champagne and sat down to write this. Not a bad 24 hours all told.

I sadly don’t have any images of Scalia getting whipped, bound or anally pleasured. That would have made for a great finish to the post. Instead I’ll run with the theme of happiness. This is originally from the Sacred Kink Academy and came to me via the Happy BDSM tumblr.

Smart people saying stupid things

I’m starting this post with a warning about the links it contains. Normally that would mean I was about to discuss edge play and feature potentially disturbing images. However, in this case the links are to conservative journalists talking about kink. I realize that may still constitute edge play for some people. On the face of it they’re discussing extreme porn from kink.com, but it quickly gets into general issues of consent and sexual ethics.

What started this unlikely flurry of posts was an essay by Emily Witt entitled What Do You Desire. The heart of the piece is a description of a shoot for the Public Disgrace site, but it also encompasses the tech culture, San Francisco culture and Emily’s own personal life. It’s an essay that got a lot of attention across the web, not just from the writers below. Personally I was unimpressed. As a kinky and techy person, who lives on the West Coast and visits the Bay Area often, I expected to read something I could relate to. Something that reflected, at least in some way, my experiences. Instead it comes across as a high concept piece. Rather than immersing herself into the culture and drawing conclusions from it, I got the impression Emily went in with a concept and cherry picked her observations to match.

While I might not have been impressed, a lot of other people were. What particularly entertained me were a series of posts from conservative writers. Roughly in order (as they responded to each other) there was: Rod Dreher, Noah Millman, Alan Jacobs, Noah Millman 2, Rod Dreher 2, Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Conor Friedersdorf and Rod Dreher 3.

There’s enough material in those articles for a dozen posts, but I’ll try and limit myself to just this one. As you might expect they have a few interesting insights scattered randomly through a whole steaming mound of ignorance. I don’t fault them too much for that. No doubt if I was writing about Conservative Evangelical Christians in the South on the basis of a single provocative article I’d also reveal a lot of my ignorance about that group. What I will fault them for is the horrible underlying logic in some of their arguments. Particularly Rod Dreher writing here on the subject of consent.

His argument is, at the heart of it, a variant on the slippery slope fallacy. He starts out by defining consent as the way people judge right from wrong. He then points out consent alone can never be enough, because people can consent to terrible things. For example, the cannibal who ate a willing victim. And therefore, if consent is not your guiding light, then what can be? How can anyone define what is morally right? The only answer must be God.

For all its many flaws, Christianity (like Islam, like Judaism) at least offers a standard by which to judge right and wrong….
…Christianity at least holds on to the idea that Truth exists, and is knowable, however imperfectly.

The huge glaring flaw in this appeal to absolutism is of course the problem of defining religious Truth. Saying Jesus would have frowned on cannibalism is uncontroversial. But what was his position on silk scarves tied to the headboard? Or a little nipple biting during coitus? And if that’s OK, does he draw the line at nipple clamps? How about anal sex between a loving couple? What if it’s a loving gay couple? I haven’t noticed too many burning bushes appearing recently to give us guidance on these areas.

Of course what people like Rod Dreher really want to impose with a religious standard is their standard. They really know what God meant to say. Of course in reality they have no divine hotline. They’re just people making judgement calls about right and wrong like everyone else. They just don’t trust the rest of us to do it properly.

I’ll leave you with an image of two sinners doing terribly wicked things. I know it might look like a beautiful image of two people enjoying an intense and intimate moment, but that can’t be right. Nipple clamps are clearly the work of Beelzebub.

The image is from the always excellent bondage is not a crime tumblr.

New tumblrs added

As the title states, I’ve added a bunch of new tumblrs to the Femdom Image page. I’ve also cleaned out any dead or dormant sites and removed a few that were no longer showing appropriate content. The new entries are…

The image below is taken from the Dudes in Distress tumblr. It’s a nice combination of colorful rope and predicament bondage. He’s one lucky distressed dude.

Cluck, cluck, gibber, gibber, my old man’s a mushroom, et cetera

I always knew I wasn’t crazy. And now I have proof. Proof I tell you!

According to the survey described in this article, people practicing BDSM are psychologically healthier than those who don’t. Admittedly the survey was of 900 BDSM practitioners from the Netherlands rather than me specifically, but I’ll take what I can get. Nice to know that paying someone to stick needles into my genitals is a sign of good mental health.

I’ve no idea how carefully they chose their sample set, but I was interested to note that the Dom/Switch/Sub percentages for men was 48/18/33 and for women 8/16/75. It was also interesting that while all categories scored higher than non-kink folks, the dominants scored the highest, then the switches and finally the submissives. So while I might saner than those people not hitting each other with sticks, I’m still bringing up the rear in the kink community.

Finally, to finish, here’s a picture of a well adjusted couple working on improving their psychological well being.

(Image Removed)

I found this image on the mira-mel tumblr. I’ve no original attribution. Weirdly, and for the first time I can remember, Google’s image search confuses it with other images and therefore returns the wrong pages for it.

Vampire Kiss

This beautiful image is entitled ‘Vampire Kiss’ and is by the artist Pain And Lust (free deviant art login required). A lot of porn color images get turned into monochrome to make them appear more ‘arty’ and erotic. This is a nice example of an original image using that palette in a very deliberate way to great effect. Based on the comments, I believe the artist with her slave is shown in this linked image entitled ‘My Slave’.

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