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.

Stay Down

This makes for a nice contrast to the image in my previous post. That was all sweetness and vulnerability. This has a far more brutal edge to it. I particularly love their expressions. It’s a nice contrast of gleeful sadism and accepted suffering.

The style of this seems familiar. I’m sure I’ve seen work from this artist elsewhere, but I’m afraid I can’t place the name right now. I discovered it via this tweet.

Updated: By way of a tweet from Sardax I can at least attribute this 70’s Japanese magazine “Fuzoku-kitan.” The actual artist remains unknown.

Fixed Comments (again, again)

Multiple readers have reported problems in leaving comments on posts. I have now fixed that issue, and all comments should go through OK. Many apologies for any frustration caused and please  email me if you have any problems in future. I very much appreciate getting comments and it drives me nuts to hear that people tried to leave them and couldn’t.

This isn’t the first time this issue has cropped up. It’s caused by a really, really stupid security module that fancies itself as a censor. Some of its rules block comments featuring ‘naughty’ words like femdom, porn or sex. Obviously on a blog like this one, that presents a problem. I want the security features it offers, but not its morality policing. Anytime they do an upgrade I have to dig back into the guts of it to figure out what I need to keep and what I need to pull out.

For any bloggers interested in the technical details I’ve put them at the end of the post. In the meantime I’ll leave you with a picture of Mistress Evilyne about to do to a submissive what I’d like to do to whoever thought of adding porn filtering rules to a low level security module.

For anyone interesting, the module in question is called ModSecurity. If you login to WHM and then go to the ModSecurity Tools panel, you can see what rules are triggering. So if you post a ‘bad’ comment you’ll see what rule is triggering that you need to remove. Then go to the ‘Rules List’ and hit ‘Edit Rules’. That’ll give you an xml type file to edit. You need to add a section that blocks the specific rules you want to kill. For example, what I just added is shown below. That removes the specific problem rules  from Atomicorp for the wordpress comments page.

<LocationMatch /wp-comments-post.php>
SecRuleRemoveById 300065
SecRuleRemoveById 300074
</LocationMatch>

Another One Bites the Dust

I was sad to see that Dungeon West in Los Angeles will be closing down in October. Justine Cross has been forced to shutter it as the COVID crisis claims another playspace. I visited it a few times over recent years and always enjoyed the space and the equipment it had.

It’s events like this that make me think it’s going to take many years to recover from the disaster that is 2020. Even a city as populous and wealthy as LA only has a very limited number of playspaces at the best of times. What we lose today will not be quickly recovered. If you have the opportunity to rent local spaces right now, or contribute to their survival in some way, then I’d urge you to do so. It’s a lot easier and more cost effective to keep an existing space going than to try and create new ones.

This is Justine Cross, the owner of both Dungeon West and East in Los Angeles. If you’d like to rent the former, then it’s available till 10/15. In the meantime Dungeon East continues to remain open for rentals.

Blogroll Updated

I’ve done some long overdue blogroll housekeeping. Dead links have been purged and I’ve added a few new sites. Additions to the front page’s dynamic blogroll and my links page include:

Hopefully there’s something of interest in there for all my readers. Thanks to social media there are a lot less kinky bloggers around than there used to be, so I always appreciate those that do write and post. If anyone knows of established femdom or kinky blogs that are regularly updated then feel free to point me in there direction via comment or  email.

This playful image is from one of the new links – Bastienne Cross. She’s a Toronto based pro-domme. I like the fact that her galleries include a mixture of styles, including a lot of her laughing. It’s not all latex, leather and snarls.