Tag: Fm

Twitter Troubles

My previous post on the future of twitter under Elon Musk was lost in the great migration. Short version: It was going to be chaotic and while he might not target kink and sex workers directly, there was a good chance they’d get caught up in the general chaos.

In hindsight that seems a decent bit of prognostication, although if I’m honest I did not expect the chaos to be quite as crazy as it is. His naïve views on content moderation  causing issues was predictable, but I didn’t expect him to be such a terrible CEO, technical leader and human being. There’s no ideal way to lay off a significant number of employees, but most people seem to manage it without coming across as incompetent emotionally unstable narcists. Not Elon. The story of Haraldur Thorleifsson, an ex-employee he mocked online encapsulates everything about Twitter 2.0. Incompetently handled, needlessly cruel, publicly embarrassing and potentially costly.

As for the actual product itself, changes to the curated timeline appear to be very sex and sex work negative. Twitter has always had a curated vs chronological option for browsing tweets. Under the old regime they tended to be different, but not wildly so. The curated version (called ‘For you’ in the current UI) had more popular tweets that got engagement over past days, but it was more a reshuffling of tweets than a radically different user experience. From my experience, that no longer seems  to be true. I can instantly tell when I’m on the ‘For you’ vs ‘Following’ view, as the content is so different.

Because I’m a bit of a nerd, I decided to try and measure the difference. I follow almost 500 people on twitter and only 20 of those accounts are not kink or sex related. With that kind of 95+ percentage skew, you’d expect my timeline to be full of awesome kinky goodness and that’s true for one of the options. Here’s what I measured for the ‘Following’ view when I categorized ~200 tweets the other night.

Category Percentage of Tweets
Non-kink related 8%
Kink related but non-explicit 43%
Explicit kinky content 38%
Explicit content selling (OnlyFan, etc.) 11%

That lines up with what I expect given who I follow. Now here’s the breakdown I for a similar number of tweets on the ‘For You’ view.

Category Percentage of Tweets
Non-kink related 45%
Kink related but non-explicit 20%
Explicit kinky content 8%
Clickbait bullshit 25%

You can see that the kinky material is massively down and the non-kinky stuff is way up. I even had to add a new category for clickbait tweets – the sort of deliberately rage inducing viral stuff that’s frequently incorrect and used to be a trademark of Facebook. Now I get more of those than I do from the actual people I’ve chosen to follow. That never used to be the case.

If someone was a huge baseball fan, and 95% of the accounts they followed were baseball related, I think it’d be seen as a massive product failure if 70% of the tweets they were shown were nothing to do with baseball. Yet that seems to be the current situation with the curated feed for twitter and kink/sex right now.

I’ll close the post with exactly the kind of content that Twitter now seems to be steering me away from. This is the incomparable Mistress Iris, as featured on her twitter feed.

You can see more of her amazing work at her Mindful Surrender site and via her OnlyFans.

Inspiration

I always enjoy shots like this one, where people have been inspired to recreate a kinky scene from art or from a magazine. For example, this previous post from all the back in 2013. They make me think of a chef doing a riff on someone else’s classic recipe.

In fact this’d probably make for a good game show, along the lines of Top Chef. However, instead of a kitchen and a few selected ingredients, contestants get a well equipped play space and a classic BDSM image to recreate. I’d love to watch a series featuring great dommes try to do their best possible recreation of a Sardax Milking Machine image or a classic John Willie bondage drawing in an hour or less.

I believe the domme here is the famous Amanda Wildefyre. You can find information about her sessions, playspace and onlines lessons on her professional site. 

Alternative Kinks

This story about the classic band called The Kinks made me smile. Apparently they’re getting annoyed with Twitter tagging tweets about them as ‘sensitive content’. Presumably Elon can’t tell the difference between a sexual proclivity and a 60 year old English rock band. Kind of incredible to think the band formed 43 years before the birth of Twitter. Social Media SEO wasn’t much of a thing in 1963.

I had to smile because I always have the opposite problem. I keep a Google alert on a few different Femdom related keyworks and it’s amazing how often I get notified about something related to the band. For a group that hasn’t release an album in 30 years they show up in my inbox with a surprising frequency.

The image is of another British band. This one from a different era and with a very different back catalogue – The Spice Girls. Personally I’d prefer to listen to The Kinks, but I have to hand it to the Spice Girls when it comes to visuals.

I believe this was taken on their reunion tour in 2007.

Screen Icon

Raquel Welch sadly passed away last week. She was a screen icon, whose face and fame almost everyone knew, even if they’d not seen her movies.

Her most famous image was of a cavewoman whose haircare and bikini technology was far in advance of its time. However, for the purposes of this blog, I thought the images below were more fitting. These are from the 1969 movie ‘The Magic Christian‘, taken with one of the leads – Ringo Starr. As far as I can tell it’s a truly terrible movie, which is kind of amazing given the talent involved. As well as Raquel, the cast includes Peter Sellers, Christopher Lee, Richard Attenborough, John Cleese and Graham Chapman. You can see a trailer here in all its 60s strangeness.

I’d say Ringo was either very brave or very foolish to let her try and whip a cigarette from his mouth. It doesn’t look like a fake movie whip. You can see a shot from the movie feature Raquel and the whip in action here.

Elegantly Poised in Blue

Here’s some lovely artwork to celebrate the weekend. I’m afraid I’ve no idea who the artist is, but they’ve done a beautiful job with the colors and composition of the scene. It’s both an intense and serene moment.

If anyone can help me attribute this to the artist then please leave a comment. The post title is a nod to an obscure cult movie, but I’d be surprised if anyone guesses which.

Be Careful What You Wish For

Here’s a follow-up thought to my previous post on pro-domme names and some client’s desire to discover their ‘real’ one: Be careful what you wish for, because there’s really only downside to this knowledge.

The first downside is you could now accidentally let it slip in front of another pro-domme. Or, even more stupidly, name drop it deliberately. Only badness can come from this. Best case scenario is you’ll be considered untrustworthy and that anything done with you in private will inevitably become public knowledge. Worst case is the domme will assume you’re a creepy boundary pusher on a power trip. Good luck getting a great session in either case.

The other major downside is that the name might not be one you associate with hot sexy fun times. What if the leather clad mistress of your dreams happens to share a name with your least favorite elderly Aunt? One minute your quivering before Mistress Cruella. The next you’re trying desperately not to picture Aunt Cheryl, your chain-smoking relative with the annoying laugh, hairy mole and slightly racist views. No matter how kinky you are, that erection isn’t coming back anytime soon.

Pictured is an actual shot of a client shortly after nagging a sex worker for her non-professional names.

Splash of Color

Surveys tell us that January and February are considered people’s least favorite month. That means we’re currently deep in the heart of gloom town. As a minor pick-me-up I therefore bring you this splash of color. It’s a nice reminder of happier, warmer and kinkier days to come.

There’s a subtle twitter handler woven into the image, but unfortunately it’s a suspended account. Poking around makes me think the image creator is Princess Honey now operating from this twitter feed.

Dealing with Ambiguity

I’m returning here to my prior post on the question of what is owed when ending a relationship between a pro-domme and a client. What’s a respectful way to navigate that transition?

The obvious response is that it depends on the history. If you’ve played together intermittently and just a handful of times, then the answer is likely nothing. It’d be ruder to reach out to announce you’ll not be requesting another session than silently moving on. If you’ve developed a deep and personal relationship, where the financial aspect is only part of the arrangement, then the answer will be very context dependent and impossible to generalize about here. But how about the middle ground? What about an ongoing relationship, with regular encounters over an extended period? The sessions wouldn’t happen if the client wasn’t paying, yet there’s also a shared understanding and familiarity that has developed over time. What then?

I think this situation can be awkward for clients to navigate for a number of reasons. Firstly, pro-dommes all have very different ways they approach things. That’s not just in style of domination, but also protocols, approach to sessions, communication, expectations, etc. For some, reaching out to explain would be a form of time wasting. For others, it’d be common courtesy. It might be hard to judge which scenario applies to your case. It’s not exactly a question you can easily ask!

Another challenge is the fact that pro-dommes can and do retire with little to no notice. Or decide to move and practice their profession elsewhere. I’ve had both happen to me and it can be quite disconcerting. Obviously, a domme can manage her career however she wants, but the possibility of a sudden departure is now always at the back of my mind.

Ultimately, I think what we owe each other should be the same thing. If I’d expect unusual consideration from a pro-domme if she moved on, then I should extend the same courtesy if I choose end the relationship. Outside of that very rare situation, I think a thoughtful email is a very reasonable approach between long term professional play partners.

In this gentleman’s case, moving on doesn’t appear to be one of his current options, although hypothermia might be. I’m afraid I don’t have an attribution for the image.

Update: Thanks to my awesome readers I can now attribute this. It’s Princess Amber shooting for Brat Princess.

Taking It Literally

I was planning to post some follow-up thoughts to my last post, but the night is late and time has run short. Instead, consider this post as a humorous intermission between serious musing. It features a couple who really decided to run with the golden shower concept. I suspect that – as is always the way with makeshift outdoor showers – the warm ‘water’ will run out before he can soap off properly.

I’ve no idea where this is from. Reverse image search doesn’t link to anything useful sadly.

Why not both?

One final comment on the recent ‘Fetish or Fashion’ pop-quiz I’ve been running. Servitor posed the very reasonable question: Why not both?

That’s a fair point. As far as the resulting images go, they contain significant elements of both fetish and fashion. I guess I should frame the question around the image creators and their primary industry. Is it a pro-domme / fetish producer or a model being paid for a shoot with a (relatively) mainstream publication. Is it someone who spends more time in dungeons and playspaces than they do strutting a catwalk? What kind of animal do they usually have at the end of a leash? Petite Pomeranian or a perky puppy boy?

There’s clearly a healthy interchange between the fashion and fetish worlds. However, I’m not sure it’s always a equally balanced exchange. A lot of pro-dommes are extremely fashion aware. Unfortunately, on the flipside, fashion editors and photographers often seem confused about kink. A charitable take would be that they’re deliberately re-interpreting and re-contextualizing kink to tell their own stories. After all, their ultimate goal is different to someone creating material for a kink or fetish market. A less charitable interpretation would be they’re raiding kink for easy shock value and then haphazardly mashing its elements together without any really understanding.

I think the distinction between fashion or fetish often doesn’t come down to the clothes, styling, make-up or beauty of the subjects. It’s down to their understanding and intelligent use of the kinky elements. Or not.

This mainstream fashion shot is from Vice Serbia, features rapper Sajsi Mc and was photographed by Alek Živković.