No Basis for a System of Government

I have little love for the British royal family or the current Conservative government. However, I have to give a shout out to its member Penny Mordaunt for pulling off this look during the recent coronation. She’s not exactly the Lady of the Lake, but as sword wielding maidens go, she’s doing a fine job.

Apparently she sported the sword for 51 minutes which turns out to be quite a feat.  I’d never vote for her, but if any dragons show up and need slaying she might be just the woman for the job.

Life’s Rich Tapestry

Warning: A sad blog post ahead. Not this specific on. I mean this one from Mistress Simone. It’s on her experiences with her submissives that have passed away. A thought provoking and moving post.

I was going to follow it up by commenting on how complex the pro-domme and client relationship is. But that’s not entirely true. I’d hate to put off nervous potential clients by over over-emphasizing that aspect of the dynamic.

They can be very simple. A mutually beneficial but limited interaction where someone scratches a kinky itch and someone else earnings a living. They can be delightful but ephemeral. The stars align, it’s magical, and then you never manage to meet again. They can be boring and unfulfilling. I’ve had a sessions – admittedly just a few out of many hundreds – that I thought were just meh. The chemistry isn’t there and you have to move on. And occasionally, as Mistress Simone describes, they can be deep, long lasting and complex. Like most relationships, you never know what you’ll find until you try.

This is Mistress Simone as featured on her professional site. She’s a Chicago and Saint Loius based pro-domme. You can find more of her thoughts via her twitterblog and prodcast.

The Goons

If you’ve hung out on Femdom social media, particularly around online or clips only dommes, you’ve probably heard the term gooning. I’d always assumed it was just another phrase for edging and something exclusively kink / femdom related. Either that or a 1950’s British comedy show. It’s easy to get the two mixed up.

However, according to this Vice article, it’s much broader than that, encompassing mainstream porn as well. Men – and it always seems to be men – setup Goon caves complete with multiple screens and endless streaming porn. The article quotes a clips4sale representative calling it the first major new fetish of the 2020’s.

I definitely understand the appeal of the edge. Denial can be delicious, even if it’s self-denial. Not so sure about the idea of a goon cave, although I guess it’s no sillier than a space called a dungeon filled with equipment modelled after ancient torture devices.

Of course, some people lean more heavily into the denial than others. Take this lady for example.

All I could think of when I saw this was ‘Deserves got nothing to do with it.’ Captioning courtesy of the always entertaining Servitor.

Scamtastic

One additional thought on the rise of AI text and image generators like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion: They’re going to be amazing tools for scammers.

There’s already a lot of fake domme’s floating around online. Mostly trying to catfish subs for money. They’re typically fairly easy to spot as they steal photographs (detectable via an image search) and run fast unsubtle shakedowns. That might change as better versions of these AI tools become freely available.

The image tools will allow them to easily generate unique content in specific settings. The text generators can handle DMs, emails and social media posts. With voice/face morphing the scammers could even take calls online. It’ll be possible to create fake personas that can interact fairly independently with their targets. With the right training they could even target particular kinks and fetishes. Will we need a ‘Pick every square that contains a naked submissive’ test for online dommes?

I’m a strong believer that anyone can be scammed if you can find the right script. Check out this fascinating article on the industrialization of internet scams if you doubt the kind of effort some people put into this stuff. It’s scary to imagine what’ll happen once these tools get into their hands.

This image is from the Stable Diffusion forum on Reddit.

Kinky Models

The hot story in tech over the last few months has been ChatGPT. The latest in large language AI models, trained across vast swathes of internet data, it has been freaking people out with it’s ability to do a pretty good impression of a person.

Inevitably there have been endless attempts to make it do naughty things because, you know, humans. The makers are constantly tweaking its guard rails but with millions of ingenious monkeys tapping away at it, not to mention all kinds of adult material in its training data, there are always going to be scenarios they’ve not covered.

The latest example comes from Vice magazine, where a journalist managed to get it to indulge in some Femdom roleplay. As you might expect if you’ve seen any of the other ChatGPT examples, it manages to be impressive, weird and unsettling all at once. It started pretty well, with mention of consent and safewords, but ultimately veered off into some far more disturbing areas. Which, in fairness, is pretty representative of kinky writing on the internet.

The writers final conclusion seems an odd one to me…

The practice of BDSM is firmly rooted in principles of consent. Will large language models ever be nuanced enough to differentiate between non-consensual acts and taboo—but consensual—situations in BDSM role-play? These models’ overall lack of rigid ethical principles highlights a major risk inherent to their design.

Rigid ethical principles are undoubtedly necessary once you start letting AI affect the physical world. Nobody wants a Femdom android that doesn’t understand consent. But for creative writing purposes? Pretty certain there’s a huge amount of online kinky fiction that violates all sorts of BDSM principles and we didn’t need ChatGPT to come up with it.

This image is by Rabbika. You can find there twitter account here.

House Boss

According to a study from China, attractive women wield more power in their households. Basically as their perceived attractiveness increased, so did the likelihood that they were the major decision maker.

It’s not too surprising a result. Repeated studies have shown that attractive people are generally treated better. Beauty helps if you’re trying to get a job or trying to get away with crime. It’s therefore not unreasonable that it’d also help you gain power in a household.

What I found interesting was this line at the end of the article.

It is also possible that interviewers saw wealthier women and those with more self-esteem as more beautiful.

The attractiveness rating was assigned by interviewers, so was obviously subjective. It might be the case that attractive people get more freedom to make decisions. But it also might be true that more forceful and dominant women are seen as more beautiful. What’s cause and what’s effect? Are bossy women perceived as more beautiful or do beautiful women get more opportunity to be bossy?

I’m not sure who this is or where the shot is from, but she certainly seems like someone who might be in charge of things. Or if not yet, soon will be.

The Cramps

From one rock band that didn’t want to associate with kink to another that very much did – The Cramps. Pioneers of the psychobilly genre, they were clearly lovers of fetish, horror, sex, B movies and pop culture kitsch. You know. All the good stuff. Their guitarist Poison Ivy had worked as a Dominatrix and clearly has a love for fetishwear.

They recently had a moment in the mainstream, thanks to the Netflix show Wednesday and Jenna Ortega dancing to their song “Goo Goo Muck”. If you like that then there are plenty of Cramps song guides online. I’m partial to the overtly kinky Ultra Twist, off the album Flamejob.

Name of the Game

Do you know the names Margaret Hyra, Neta-Lee Hershlag or Demetria Guynes? Any ideas? How about Julie Smith or Robyn Fenty? You might know them better by their stage names of, respectively, Meg Ryan, Natalie Portman, Demi Moore, Julianne Moore and Rihanna. Does knowing their original names change the perception of their work? Outside of idle curiosity, I’m guessing the answer is no.

I’m writing about names because of this NYT article on sex work and working names. It’s written by a pro-domme named Mistress Natalie and details all the aggressive boundary pushing clients did to try and find her ‘real’ name. I’m sure its contents are no surprise to other sex workers. Clients who pay attention shouldn’t be too surprised either. It’s a common complaint on sex workers social media feeds.

It always struck me as a weird thing for clients to care about. I get why creepy boundary pushers do it, but what’s everyone else’s excuse? We’re accepting of professional names in all sorts of other situations. Isn’t the name that someone chose for themselves more interesting and meaningful than the one picked by their parents a few decades back? Nobody accuses Helen Mirren of being inauthentic just because she doesn’t go around calling herself Ilyena Lydia Mironoff. Although, frankly she probably should use that, because it’s an awesome name.

This is the great Dame Helen herself, shooting for US Vogue in 2013.