Sad day

I was very sad to read today about the death of author Terry Pratchett. He’d been suffering from early onset Alzheimer’s for some years, so it wasn’t particularly surprising, but that didn’t make it any less upsetting.

I’ve probably never mentioned it here, but his books are a regular part of my self-aftercare when playing and traveling. My vacations to various cities have a regular pattern. I meet and play with an interesting domme on an afternoon. I go for a beautiful meal in the evening. And, while enjoying a glass of wine and spacey on post scene endorphins, I read Terry Pratchett over diner. His gentle blend of humor, parody and witty references can make the end of a great day close to perfect.

His books have a great number of strong female characters (Esme Weatherwax, Gytha Ogg, Angua, Tiffany Aching, Susan Sto Helit, etc), but not a lot of kinky references. The most obvious one I could remember comes from The Light Fantastic. He’s just introduced a female warrior into the storyline…

“Now, there is a tendency at a point like this to look over one’s shoulder at the cover artist and start going on at length about leather, tightboots and naked blades.
Words like ‘full’, ‘round’ and even ‘pert’ creep into the narrative, until the writer has to go and have a cold shower and a lie down.
Which is all rather silly, because any woman setting out to make a living by the sword isn’t about to go around looking like something off the cover of the more advanced kind of lingerie catalogue for the specialized buyer.
Oh well, all right. The point that must be made is that although Herrena the Henna-Haired Harridan would look quite stunning after a good bath, a heavy-duty manicure, and the pick of the leather racks in Woo Hun Ling’s Oriental Exotica and Martial Aids on Heroes Street, she was currently quite sensibly dressed in light chain mail, soft boots, and a short sword.
All right, maybe the boots were leather. But not black.”

Terry Pratchett from the Light Fantastic

I’ll leave you an image of another of Sir Terry’s memorable female characters – Adora Belle Dearheart. She’s forceful, opinionated, sarcastic, dresses severely and has been known to put men in hospital with her spiked heels. Just the kind of woman I think my readers would appreciate.

Adora Belle Dearheart by rubendevelaThis image is by the artist Rubendevela. Her character is a support and aid to Golems, which explains the large hand holding the ashtray behind her.

Big tech and adult content

The recent decision by Google to ban blogs featuring sexually explicit images/video or graphic nudity continues to reverberate around the blogsphere. While in theory text only explicit blogs are safe, but how long would you like to bet on that lasting? If they can change the rules once, they can do it again and probably will.

Over time Google has clearly got more conservative and less idealistic. Their image search is another good example of that. For example, assuming you have safe search off, compare a search for the lovely Mistress T on Google and Bing. Google barely features her in the results where Bing features a bare her from every angle imaginable. CBT on Google is a lot of powerpoint slides, where on Bing it’s wall to wall penises. My favorite is probably Men in Pain. On Google it’s a lot of stock photos of guys with headaches where on Bing it’s all sorts of good femdom stuff. This kind of conservatism is an expression of Google’s current culture.

They’re not alone in this. Apple has consistently run into bad press for censorship. Facebook recently got into trouble for it’s policy of blocking drag performers from their platform, and has many previous censorship problems. Amazon seems to run into censorship questions every few months.

What I find fascinating (outside my annoyance at the outcome) is how these kind of decisions are taken. The external perception of large tech companies is of corporate monoliths, but the reality is that very few people will be involved with these kind of decisions. I’ll also bet that they’re not taken at a particularly high level. A few product managers get into a room and make a bad call based on very limited information. They end up affected millions of people, but they’re not some grand expression of corporate will taken by cigar smoking board members. They’re a corporate culture filtered through a few people.

I had difficulty picking an image for this post until I stumbled on the shot below. It seemed apt.

GoFuckYourself

The bandwagon rolls on

Having spent the last year or so all over the internet, Fifty Shades of Grey is now popping up on my television. The movie is due out next month and the trailers are running frequently. I’m just hoping it doesn’t come up as a topic of conversation with any of my non-kinky friends. After a few drinks I’ll probably be unable to avoid ripping into it, which might lead to speculation about how I know so much about it.

An article on it that I would be happy to point my friends to is this one in (of all places) the International Business Times. If features San Francisco’s Mistress Morgana, Seattle’s own Mistress Matisse and submissive Stephen Elliot. They do a good job of talking about the complexity and variety in kink, as well as emphasizing the need for consent.

I find it amusing that although most regular people primarily think about maledom when they think about BDSM (in my opinion), it seems like that the majority of articles on it feature female dominants. I don’t think there’s any great underlying social subtext to that. It’s just that journalists are busy/lazy and virtually all professional dominants are female. It’s much easier to find the contact details of a local pro-domme via a quick web search than it is to track down a lifestyle male dominant.

MorganaThe above image is of Mistress Morgana. She’s a BDSM professional, educator and guide. If you’re in the San Francisco area and interested in experiencing that wooden spoon for yourself, her contact details are here.

Kimchi and a strapon

This is the great Lori Adorable eating kimchi and sporting a strapon, as photographed by Mikey McMichaels. You can see more of his work via his tumblr. Lori Adorable maintains her own tumblr – Girl with the Most Cake. If you’re anything like me it’s the kind of tumblr that you start idly browsing and the next thing you know it’s an hour later and you’ve got a dozen new interesting thoughts to ponder.

Lori Adorable

Scream therapy

I’m safely back in Seattle after flying back late on Sunday night. I finished the trip with a bang, or possibly that should be a thwack, by playing with the beautiful Domina Ai-Li on Sunday afternoon. It was another really fun session. Playing fairly heavy on consecutive days creates some interesting dilemmas, as dommes do love to poke, prod and generally work over any bruises they spot from the previous day!

In my previous post I commented on the role the eyes can play in a scene. Today I’m going to go a couple of inches lower and talk about the throat. It’s not a body part that gets mentioned often, but I think it definitely played a role in my session with Ai-Li. I had a slightly sore throat when we started (probably as a result of too much drinking and talking in busy bars) and yelling and screaming in pain didn’t help matters. I have a tendency to do that when someone beats the inside of my thighs particularly hard. As a result I tried to bite back my yells to be kinder to my throat, and that in turn seemed to lower my pain tolerance. I think vocalizing is a way to release tension and push through tough situations. It lets me be free and simply express what I feel. Trying to hold it back makes it harder for me to take pain and therefore increases its apparent intensity. So I guess it you want to make it tougher for a submissive, tell him or her to shut the hell up.

Of course if you want to let someone scream but not scare the neighbors into calling the cops, a gag is always a good alternative. It doesn’t give you silence, but does muffle yells while still allowing a healthy moan.

GagAtTheReadyI’m afraid I don’t know who the above domme is. If you do then feel free to enlighten me via the comments.

I was told there’d be no math

While I’m on a 50’s fashion theme, here’s a nice shot of two 1950’s ‘maths teachers’ conferring in front of a chalkboard (blackboard to my British friends). I’ve sadly got no original attribution for it. The lady on the left looks vaguely familiar, but I can’t place a name. A reverse image search gives me vanilla 50’s fashion sites mixed in between the femdom sites. I assume the stick was designed for pointing rather than beating, but clearly there are plenty of perverts out there (and in here) willing to imagine other uses for it.

Ladies at the chalkboard

Win, Win, Win

I made it back to a damp and cold Seattle all in one piece. Unfortunately I came down with some stupid bug the day I flew back. I guess it’s better than getting sick on the flight there, but it still sucks to arrive home feeling terrible. Before I head back to my sickbed I want to do a bit of signal boosting for a very worthy blog post.

Mistress T is offering free access to her excellent members site in return for supporting a charitable organization named Kiva that specializes in microfinancing. She’s not asking you to give money – just loan it. You deposit some money with Kiva and pick individuals to receive it. They then repay you over time. In the meantime, as Mistress T describes in her post, she’ll give you access to her top quality femdom porn, with the access period determined by the amount loaned. So you get to help a worthy cause, generate some positive karma, get free porn and get your money back! It’s a win, win, win.

I’ve always been very impressed with Mistress T and the way she conducts herself. Both in her professional and personal life she appears to act with great integrity and thoughtfulness. It’s posts like this one, which’ll clearly cost her time and money to support, that really bring home those qualities. Not to mention that she has a truly beautiful bottom!

Mistress TImage of Mistress T’s beautiful butt comes from this blog post. Should you wish to see a preview of what her members site offers then check it out here.

Not always an act

Introducing a dominatrix guest character is a well known television trope. It’s an excuse to put an attractive actress into a slinky outfit, titillate with some kinky sex, and have the lead characters frown meaningfully while brooding on the dangers of sex and power. The latest instance comes from the series ‘Forever’. I’ve not watched it, but I will admit Hilarie Burton does make an appealing domme. Sadly the script sounds like the usual rubbish. The victim is killed by being electrocuted with a cattle prod to the point where he can’t breath. I’ve been zapped with a cattle prod, and while it gave me a hell of a kick, breathing was never an issue.

Oddly enough, just a day after reading about the Forever episode, I came across this story on the South African actress Yvonne van den Bergh who outed herself as the domme Mistress Baton. It was sadly forced on her by some creepy stalker, but the subsequent article seems relatively straightforward and non-judgmental. They even included a lengthy post from her facebook page explaining how she got into BDSM. The circumstances are unfortunate, but seeing this kind of story handled in a relatively positive fashion makes a refreshing change.

Yvonne van den Berg

The image shows Yvonne van den Berg. I don’t believe she has a professional website but she does have a fetlife presence (under her domme nom de plume) if you’d like to read more of her thoughts.

Lending a hand

If you’ve browsed femdom porn in the last few years you’ve probably encountered Coral Korrupt. A Fort Lauderdale based pro-domme, she’s shot clips for ClubDom and Femdom Empire. I’ve featured her in a couple of previous posts of my own (here and here).

Sadly she’s been diagnosed with a serious form of cancer which she’s currently battling. Her friend Lexi Sindel (also a well known femdom face) has established a GoFundMe fundraiser to help pay some of her bills. If you’ve ever appreciated her images or enjoyed her clips, this would be a perfect way to give something back. Alternatively, if you’ve just enjoyed a lot of different free femdom porn over the years, think of this as a way to give back to performers and restore some karmic balance.

Coral KorruptImage is of Coral Korrupt from her website gallery. You can donate to her medical fund here.

Bayonetta

Having touched on gaming in my previous post, that does give me an excuse to segue onto a game related topic. Specifically the game Bayonetta, which features a tall, aggressive leather clad female protagonist. It clearly draws on BDSM culture (as alluded to here by one of the designers), but I’d always dismissed it as an example of the typical adolescent dominatrix fantasy that crops up fairly often in video games. Maddy Myers, writing in Paste magazine, thinks otherwise. It’s an interesting article, and she clearly identifies with both the dominant role and the leading character.

We don’t just get invited to watch Bayonetta, we also inhabit her. When I play, Bayonetta is me, and the camera’s glances are just the “sub gaze”—the male submissive’s gaze. Bayonetta holds all the cards.
Maddy Myers in Paste

It’s rare to read such a thoughtful commentary on a video game. It’s even rarer to have a woman come out as a dominant in a non-professional BDSM setting. Pro-domme tell-all articles are a dime a dozen, but I can’t remember the last time I encountered a woman identifying that way in the context of her professional non-kinky life. You can read more from her at her site.

While I head off to Amazon to order a copy of the first version of the game, I’ll leave you with some Bayonetta cosplay by TraumaticCandy. The original character design is deliberately freakishly long-limbed, and this costume does an amazing job of capturing that.

Bayonetta by TraumaticCandy