Submission Possible

Anyone who has run out of Netflix and Hulu shows to watch might want to check out ‘Submission Possible’ by Madison Young on Revry. I’ve not seen it, so can’t offer a personal recommendation, but according to Madison it’s “a kinky queer travel show…exploring different kink and queer communities in different cities.” You can read a bit more background on it articles here and here. This isn’t a great time to be pitching a travel show, but after endless food and chef themed travel series, it’d be nice to see a kinky variation.

This is Madison Young shooting for kink.com. I love the look of predatory intent she has in this shot.

Strange Reaction

I’ve experienced a strange emotional response in recent weeks. People hitting me has made me angry. That’s obviously not unusual for most people but for me, in the context of kink, it’s very strange. Corporal play was one of my primary fantasies for many years and a staple of my scenes. Yet recently it has generated less of an “Ooohhh, yeah….” and more of a “Hey! That hurts goddamn it!”

I have no idea why this is. Other painful things like needles, electricity, clamps and miscellaneous spiky things still get me buzzed and into that submissive floaty space. I can lean into their pain and relax under the dominants control. Yet corporal play had triggered the bad kind of ‘fight or flight’ response where I just want to make it stop.

I’m really hoping it’s a temporary thing. Maybe it’s to do with external stress or me being general angry at the state of the world. I’m not conscious of that kind of mental shift, but clearly something is awry. I’ve never met a domme yet who didn’t enjoy some form of corporal play, and I’d hate to lose such an important part of my kinky repertoire. Anyone else find they’ve had a favorite activity suddenly twist on them like this?

While my physical response might be screwed up, my visual response to corporal is still working just fine. I love this action shot from the Glasgow based Mistress Scarlet (found on her twitter feed).

Governess Inka

I’m continuing the corporal theme for just one more post. I love this image for the contrast it presents with most online erotica. Mistress Inka is sitting in a comfortable chair, in a regular room, in a dress that not only covers every inch of her body but obscures even her shape. Yet it’s still wonderfully sexy.

I also think it’s also another example of how loose the link between kink, culture and personal experience can be. This has a real Victorian governess feel to it. I’m guessing nobody reading this had a governess, and certainly nobody had a Victorian one. Yet the image and dynamic still works. Certain archetypes persist, drawing on underlying desires that we may not even be aware of. The image uses an idea from the past, but that’s really just camouflage to sneak in its kinky themes of punishment, control and desire.

Image is from this tweet. For the watermark, I assume it’s associated with Sissy Manor (main site here). Mistress Inka’s professional site is available here.

Intensity (or not)

My random thought of the day: Intensity of play is entirely situational. It depends on the chemistry you feel in the moment, your emotional state beforehand, the stress in your daily life and countless other factors. It’s fine to ask for a lighter scene or to bail out of an intense scene. It’s fine to play hard with one person but lightly with another. It’s fine to change limits from scene to scene.

I used to think of kink as a one way street. If I achieved a certain level of intensity with a domme, I couldn’t pull back from there. And if I did some activity with one domme, then obviously I should be able to do that with all dommes. It was a bit like a videogame where I was unlocking achievements. Once you’ve got the heavy whipping badge, then obviously heavy whipping should always be a possibility in all future scenes.

These days I’m older and wiser. There is no grand council of dommes collecting scene reports and making sure nobody ever backslides on their level of play. I’d much rather evolve my play slowly and organically with a new domme than immediately race towards my limits as fast as possible. And if I’m feeling stressed or not in a good masochistic headspace, I’m also now fine asking for a lighter scene that I can relax into. It turns out that you don’t get into trouble for not always playing on the edge of what’s possible.

Talking of intensity – here’s a pretty heavy caning scene. Not sure where this originates from sadly.

Bye Bye Tumblr

I’m sure most readers will have seen the news that tumblr is going to ban porn from December 17th. It’s depressing but, after their acquisition by Yahoo and then Verizon, not entirely surprising. I’ve written about the challenges of dealing with adult content in corporate environments in the past. As a relatively small independent platform with a history of being friendly to porn, tumblr would never have wanted to decimate its user base like this. For Verizon, its a case of cutting a fraction of users of one product in one division. The risk/reward calculation for them looks very different. Of course, that doesn’t make it any less a shitty and horrible thing to do to a community.

As Bacchus at ErosBlog has been pointing out for over a decade now, if you don’t own your domain and do your own hosting, you’re always going to be at risk of being screwed over by your platform of choice. Sadly that’s not really an answer for the average tumblr user. I’m lucky in having the time and resources needed to run a site like this one, but it’s definitely a non-trivial investment. The average tumblr user, who wants to post some hot photos and share some thoughts, isn’t going to want to spend an hour with tech support trying to figure out why his database has crashed and why /dev/dva1 has run out of space (as I did over the weekend).

Unfortunately, I don’t really know of a valid alternative that I can point people at. There are other platforms for sharing adult content (like imagefap and various tube/hub sites), but they tend to have horrible UI, dodgy advertising practices, poor community tools and a terrible attitude  to content creators. If I had VC level money, I’d be treating this as an opportunity to create a new platform and fill a sudden gap in the market. As it is, I can only keep my eye open for somebody else doing that.

In the meantime, there are tools for archiving your favorite tumblrs. Bacchus has a post on one approach. I’ve had some luck using TumblrThree, although it’s not exactly a polished UI. There are also people working on more broadly archiving tumblr content for posterity. If anyone else has either suggestions for archiving content or for good places to move it to, feel free to leave a comment here. I’ll share updates and suggestions as the situation evolves.

My own image page is packed with tumblr links, so it looks like I’ll need to delete most of those next week. This particular image is via 11dutch tumblr. I believe that is Mistress Baton.

Strict Brita

I’ve posted in the past about my liking for images that are modified to scratch people’s specific kinky itches. Not so much for the images themselves, but for what it says about the variety of human desire and the endless drive to feed it.

This image is another case in point. It’s a particularly well done modification I think. The original is from 1910, by Carl Larsson and called ‘Brita in the drawing room‘.  Obviously somebody triggered off the school ma’am look of Brita and decided to add a cane to the image. I didn’t actually realize it had been modified initially, and thought I’d stumbled up on an interesting new fetish artist. In hindsight, the contrast between her expression and the rest of her ensemble should have tipped me off.

 

Holiday Indulgence

I was going to try and argue that this was a continuation of the schoolgirl theme from my previous post. But really it’s just me indulging myself in a hot shot from Mistress Iris in a roleplay with @momoemu. I love their long dark hair and the neat formal outfits. At a time of year associated with indulging in sweets and excessive calories, this is my own personal holiday eye candy.

The Pleasure of Play

I was surprised to see a very well known domme state (on twitter) how much she hated the term ‘play’ when it related to kink and femdom. It’s a term I never used in my early days of kinky exploration – because that was such super serious stuff – but it’s one I’ve come to use and like a lot.

I should say out of the gate that of course femdom can be more than just play. It can be a major part of a relationship, a 24×7 dynamic, a way to modify behavior, an ethos, etc. But let’s face reality. The majority of lifestyle femdom activity and almost all of professional femdom activity is a form of play (from the client perspective). And that’s absolutely not a bad thing.

The Oxford English dictionary defines play as – “Engage in activity for enjoyment and recreation rather than a serious or practical purpose.” I think most people’s lives are full of serious and practical activities. Going to work, maintaining a house, caring for a family, paying bills – these are all serious and practical activities. Don’t we deserve a break to enjoy some recreation? And what could be more recreational than pulling on fun outfits, tying people up, teasing their erogenous zones or blowing their minds with intense sensations? There’s a reason pro-dommes use sensual, sadistic and playful to describe possible session dynamics and not words like serious, practical and sensible.

I don’t have a problem with someone wanting to get more out of a femdom dynamic than kinky fun times. I love reading about couples that have taken it beyond that level. But given a world serious lacking in fun, and a culture that has some seriously messed up views on sex and kink, why be against the idea of kink as play? Admittedly, sometimes it can be intense, crazy and freaky, but that doesn’t mean it’s not play.

Here’s a somewhat literal representation of play and femdom. This is from Underling.

Skool Daze

Servitor was taking me to task for the spelling in the title of my previous post. In my defense, while memento might be the standard spelling, there is a wiktionary definition page for momento. And, as we all know, any page on a site beginning with ‘wiki’ is always 100% reliable. I actually like the idea of a momento being a memento of a moment but, if I’m honest, it was more a typo than anything else.

He suggests writing lines in a classroom scene would be a suitable punishment. I’ve nothing against a classroom scene, but writing lines sounds awfully boring. I’d rather take 6 of the best. Or maybe 12. Perhaps even 18? I’d be willing to misspell more things in future if necessary. In fact, given my proofreading abilities, that’s one thing I can guarantee.

Marks and a Smile

I like this image for his sexy marks, her lovely smile and that none fetish dress. It’s nice to see a caning scene with a cute outfit that’s not supposed to be a teacher or a governess role play. Sometimes a good caning can just be a good caning, no fancy scenario required. I’m less keen on the kitchen setting. I’m not sure naked dangling genitals and food prep areas should ever coincide.

This is of course Mistress Ella Kross.