Heartwarming

Somehow I missed this heartwarming story from back in May – Quarantine Leading To More People Taking In Foster Gimps. Quarantine has been tough on a lot of people, but it’s nice to know that many abandoned gimps  have found dungeons of their own. Remember, a gimps for life, not just for quarantine. Note: Main story starts about 1:40 into the audio segment.

Artwork is by Sleinad Flar. You can find his Deviant Art site here and his BDSMLR site here.

Locktober to the Max

I’m continuing the metal bondage theme with this astonishing metal body cage owned by Amanda Wildefyre. Forget locking just the penis up – here’s a way to guarantee there’s no hanky-panky of any sort. It looks like it has been paired with an inflatable rubber body suit, just to really crank the confinement kink up to 11.

Amanda Wildefyre is a Minneapolis based pro-domme, with a really incredibly collection of equipment. If you can’t visit in person, then she also has a clips store here.

Lockdown

I’m sure most readers have already seen the story featured in today’s post. It’s been covered in the tech press, the mainstream press and sex blogs. It even popped up on Colbert’s Late Show. Yet I feel I really couldn’t hold my head up high as a femdom sex blogger if I didn’t mention the Bluetooth enabled chastity device that has a horrible security flaw. Apparently during penetration testing (huh huh) security researchers discovered that attackers could take control of the lock, as well as scan for contacts and location information.

From the tech perspective, I think this is the kind of hacking story we should get used to seeing. It’s getting cheaper and cheaper to add this technology into products of all types. There are lots of small companies springing up making specialized internet enabled devices and security is hard to get right and hard for end users to understand. That inevitably makes it a low priority for the manufacturers.

From the sex perspective, there seems to be a bit of a disconnect between the reporting and what chastity device users normally say. The mainstream articles suggests you might require heavy duty angle grinders to escape. What I’ve read in the past from chastity device users is that pretty much any device is removable if it doesn’t involve a piercing. Give it enough lube and wiggling and the male genitals are capable of  Houdini-esque feats of escape.

This drawing – featuring a far more traditional device – is by The Smutty Rogue.

Oxymoron?

Writing my last post raised a question for me: Is it ever possible to do a consensual blackmail scene? Isn’t it actually an impossibility?

Consensual blackmail is clearly a well established niche in findomme play. The domme gets hold of embarrassing material, either directly from the submissive or by creating it from their interactions, and uses it to threaten the submissive. It might be used as a one-off scene or part of an ongoing dynamic involving regular payment.

The thing that makes me question the consensual element isn’t the role of the domme or the submissive. It’s the need for a third party. Pretty much by definition there must be someone who’d be shocked by the material exposed. Blackmail isn’t effective because of the dynamic between the blackmailer and blackmailee. It works because it leverages the relationship between the blackmailee and the other people in their life. If they don’t care, there is no leverage. But if they do care, then how is this ever consensual? The need for shock and offense seems an intrinsic part of the recipe.

I guess you could roleplay the idea of exposing the information, with both parties agreeing that the final step would never be taken. However, that doesn’t typically seem to be how these things play out. It’d certainly drain a lot of energy out of the scene. Roleplay typically focuses on the context and setting for the scene, not the execution. A teacher/student scene is a roleplay, but the beating is still real.

This artwork is by Lera Balashova, found on her Dribble site.

Shiny New Server

Welcome to the new server, same as the old server (hopefully). Migration has completed to the new set-up, but it should all look exactly the same to anyone reading. I lost one post in the process, but since that was just about starting serving migration, that’s no big deal. If you encounter any site issues, particular around comments, then please let me know. I think I’ve got everything configured correctly but it’s hard to be 100% sure.

As an aside, I think it’s amazing any of this stuff ever works at all. If you’re just browsing the web it all seems pretty solid, but under the covers there’s a hell of a lot of duct tape and bailing twine. This site runs on top of WordPress, which is a fairly complex piece of software. On top of that is a bunch of plugins, themes and widgets, all written by different people. WordPress itself is built on a bunch of other software products, like Apache, PHP, SQL, Perl, etc. A lot of those have their own plugins and customized tools, along with the UI that allows them to be configured. Underneath it all is the server itself (running a flavor of Linux) along with the various internet technologies like DNS, SSL, TCP, etc. that lets everything talk together. Everyone of these critical pieces is available in different versions, and almost every website you visit will be running all of them in some different combination of versions. Yet it incredibly all works, as shown by the fact your reading this.

The internet is arguable mankinds greatest achievement and certainly its most complex machine. The software that delivers this post to the screen of a smartphone has thousands of PhDs and millions of man hours of development behind it. And yet, here’s me using it to deliver sexy pictures of kinky people. I can’t think of a better use for all that time and effort.

I believe this particular sexy picture is of Skin Diamond shooting for Divine Bitches.

Mistress Blunt and her finsub

I’m continuing the financial domination theme by linking to this article by Mistress Blunt. It features a lengthy interview with her female financial submissive. That combination of a professional domme, a female submissive and a findomme kink is pretty rare.

I really enjoyed the way the interview unfolded, and their dynamic comes across as both very hot and cute. It really captures the appeal of financial domination, even for those not into it. However, the intensity of the play did make me a little uncomfortable, particularly given that it only started this year (based on comments in the interview). I’m guessing the submissive is a young professional, in a career with a high earnings growth potential. I really hope she doesn’t do anything to cause her future self to curse the foolishness of youth.

I was lucky enough to find myself in a similar position in my career when I moved to the US. In hindsight, there are a lot of things that make me want to reach back in time and slap some sense into the younger me, but fortunately money management isn’t one of them. I always split my finances into essential (food, rent, etc.), discretionary (luxuries, trips, etc.) and investment (saving for retirement). One thing I did right was to be strict about funding my kinky fun purely from the discretionary bucket. Obviously I was hugely privileged and lucky to be able to fund all three, but I’m very glad now that I kept that distinction. I don’t have a financial domination kink, but it would have been very easy to have gone wild splurging on multi-day multi-domme play and lengthy kinky foreign trips.

For me it’s important to always treat professional kinky interactions as a luxury item. That’s not to say kink itself is optional, but paying for it with a professional certainly is. I imagine that it becomes a lot harder to maintain that kind of distinction when your kinks are intimately bound up with money and how its distributed. I can only hope the finsub in question can picture a conversation with her future self and ensure she’s careful to make it a happy one.

This is the beautiful Mistress Blunt, in an image from her gallery page. She’s a NYC based pro-domme whose professional site can be found here and her twitter feed here.

The Simp

Internet culture has thrown-up (and I think that’s exactly the right phrase) yet another odd concept – simping. As far as I can tell, from articles like this one, a simp is a man who offers a woman time, attention, money or respect, without getting a ‘sufficient’ recompense.

It’s obviously an idea deeply rooted in misogyny and entitlement,  with heavy incel vibes. Of course those characteristics means that, rather than dying quietly and alone in a forgotten corner of the internet, it has been spread far and wide. This month is apparently ‘No Simp September’, where one of the rules is don’t give money to sex workers.

The whole thing is deeply unpleasant, but the logic of that last bit baffles me. If you’re upset about not getting a return on time or money invested, isn’t the more transactional nature of sex work exactly what you want? Sex workers are typically very clear about the services they offer and you’ll definitely get the chat time or pictures or custom clips or whatever you’ve agreed. Negotiation and mutual agreement on the transaction is baked into the process. I’m certainly not suggesting sex workers should have to put up with douches who believe in this kind of shit, but the inherent logic of their position seems bizarre to me.

I guess when it comes to male entitlement in online cultures I shouldn’t be too surprised that Mr. Logic is no longer home. I suspect in this case Mr Logic has not only left home, but he’s boarded it up, sold all his possessions and is currently living as a end-times prepper in Idaho under the name Captain Beefkillington the Third.

This clearly isn’t a simp in action. She’s very kindly beating and humiliating him in exchange for all those gifts. That seems like a very fair return. The excellent artwork is – of course – by the always amazing Sardax.

A Decade of Femdom Resource

I launched this site exactly ten years ago today. So happy birthday to me and a big thank you to all my readers.

Despite the fact that I’ve been aware for months that I was due to hit this milestone, it still seems quite extraordinary to have made it this far. In that time I’ve written 2,896 posts, which works out to writing a new post approximately every 30 hours for a decade. I’ve been running it for a third of my adult life.

I created the site because the Femdom blog that I wanted to read didn’t exist. I like to think that it now does and all that time hasn’t been wasted. However, it would have died a quick and early death if nobody else had read it. So thanks to everyone out there, readers both past, present and future. It might be a cliche, but it’s also true: I couldn’t have done it without you. Thanks for the clicks, views and comments.

This will not be my final post on the topic. As is my usual style, I feel a series of posts coming on. In the meantime, I’ll finish with some art from Augustine. My very first post  featured his work, so it seems appropriate to return to it a decade later.

Interactive Gags

I’ve been surprised in the past by how much some dommes like throat fucking. From both comments on social media and personal experience it’s clearly a real button pusher. On multiple occasions I’ve been spluttering and coughing on a dildo wondering ‘Why?’

I guess I shouldn’t be too perplexed. Gags are hot, and a strap-on in the mouth is just an interactive form of that. From the domme perspective of intimate penetration and generating a strong reaction, there’s not much too choose between the throat or the anus. In fact, if you want to watch for a subs response, the face works way better. It’s just the submissive’s bad luck that they don’t have a prostate in the back of the throat. Which makes me wonder – was there ever a gay version of deep throat that went with that particular spin?

This is by the artist Skyldfri, sourced from this specific tweet.