The beauty of dominant women
The rather sexy image below is from Lady Pim who plays out of the Ritual Chamber in Toronto. She also has a short but informative thread on puppy play here.
I’ve never yet indulged in this kink, but it does make sense to me. It pushes buttons around giving up control, obedience, caring dominance, physical restraint, etc. Like a lot of BDSM dynamics, it allows the submissive to simplify his thinking, give up real world concerns and focus on the dominant and her instructions.
If you celebrate Christmas then let me wish you a happy one. If you don’t, then let me wish you a happy Tuesday and add that all this festive nonsense will be over in just another day.
As someone who spends his Christmas at home, getting together with local friends, I’m always entertained by the twitter #DuvetKnowItsChristmas tag. Nothing is guaranteed to make me feel better about my travel plans (or lack of them) than seeing the terrible sleeping arrangements of strangers at Christmas.
I believe this is by the artist CoaX.
I was flipping rapidly through my twitter feed the other day when I noticed a domme pitching her ‘selectively crafted artisinal pee’. Now I know a lot of dommes are proud of their healthy diets and the resulting liquid output, but ‘artisinal’ was a new one for me. Since the dictionary definition is something ‘traditionally created using non-mechanical means’, doesn’t that make all pee artisinal? Are their any mass produced golden showers out there for submissive on the go who doesn’t have the time to really enjoy an artisinal product?
Fortunately, when I flicked back to check out exactly what I’d seen, it turned out to be a random ad that twitter has snuck in for artisinal *tea*. Which made a lot more sense. I don’t think the world is ready for the intersection of the pretensions of the beverage tasting world with the kinky world of golden showers.
I’m not exactly sure where this is from, but that’s one very happy looking wet dude.
It’s damp and cold in Seattle right now, which makes these recent shots by Lady Hinako and Jordyn Fox particularly appealing. I love their smiles in the first image.
I’m currently being inundated with Christmas cards featuring happy families in amazing locations. It used to be that Christmas cards were generic shots of Santa, stables, mangers, stars and holly. The card was generic but the the message personal. Now cards seem to be a physical version of Instagram, customized with photographs that emphasize what a fabulous lifestyle all my friends have. The cards are less greetings and more tribal markers of success. I think next year I’m going to arrange some personal images like this for my cards. You send me shots of your rugrats frolicking on a Caribbean beach, and I’ll send you shots of me in bondage, getting fucked up by gorgeous women in leather. If you want to highlight how well you’re doing at life, I think it’s only fair that I get to do the same in my own peculiar way. Or we could all switch back to Santa, holly and wreaths. I’m OK either way.
With tumblr dead, the destination of choice for a lot of kinky blogs seems to be bdsmlr. A big part of me really wants the site to succeed. I was a fan of all the interesting erotic imagery on tumblr and would love to see somewhere that could migrate to. Unfortunately, right now I think that the jury is still out on bdsmlr.
At the moment they’re still struggling to deal with the influx of ex-tumblr folks and all the extra traffic involved. The site UI is a little clunky and lacks the polish of tumblr. It’s relatively easy to get some sort of service off the ground, but it’s tough to make it scalable, manageable and usable. There’s an old saying in software development that the last 10% of the project takes 90% of the work, and I think the site developers aren’t even into that part of the problem space yet.
Also, as Ferns pointed out via a comment, we don’t really know anything about the owners of the site. There’s no background on the company or the people. The original TOS they had was terrible, giving them rights to anything shared via their site. They did change that – making me think it was simply something they copy/pasted from elsewhere – but it does indicate a lack of diligence around a pretty critical area.
Probably the thing that most pisses me off about it is actually no fault of the bdsmlr team at all. It’s down to the clusterfuck that is SESTA/FOSTA. As it stands their TOS completely bars usage of the site that mentions sex work. Any kind of paid service mention gets you banned. So we’re in a situation where 95% or more of the site’s content will be created by various types of sex workers, yet they will derive zero benefit from it. In fact they’ll be barred from the site should they try and extract some tiny benefit. Most social media sites have generally been very negative on sex to date, but it takes some special type of legal fuckery to create a site that’s positive about kinky sex imagery but entirely negative about the people who create it.
All that said, and having spent an entire post picking at its flaws, I would still encourage you to check out bdsmlr. The SESTA/FOSTA bullshit is not their fault, and it’s entirely possible they’ll shake off their growing pains and deliver a solid service. The basic idea is a good one. You have to register to browse it, but it’s an easy process, and only takes a minute or two. I like the idea, and should they become big and successful, maybe they’ll be in a position to help out in the ongoing legal battle over sex work.
Here’s another image from a now defunct tumblr that I archived for reference purposes – Continuous State of Desire. I’m afraid I don’t know the original source for the photograph.
I’ve posted images from a fair number of my sessions in 2018, but I don’t think any of them have been from my adopted hometown of Seattle. That’s not because I haven’t been exploring kink here. I took a break of a year or so after Lydia retired, but since I’ve been venturing out more into the Seattle scene. I suspect my lack of Seattle posts is probably due a sense of uncertainty. When you’re trying to figure out dynamics and what works, there’s little time left over for documentary footage. Fortunately in the last few months I’ve gotten a touch more grounded, thanks to a series of great sessions with the fabulous Ms Savannah Sly.
Leading up to the holiday period we did a couple of sessions that were just a week apart. A wide variety of kinky fun was featured, with a big part of it focused on my upper chest. The first session featured a beautiful array of needles as shown here. She started on the outside with the smallest gauge (25) and worked inwards, finishing with the biggest gauge (18). You can see the thickness variation in this close-up shot here. I have to say that while the result was very pretty, the ordering was particularly evil. The breastbone and thinner flesh makes the inner needles more painful, so combining that with the bigger gauge really got a good loud reaction out of me.
The second session featured (among other things) an innocuous office supply that turned out to be way more painful than a needle in the flesh. My schooldays taught me that a rubber band could sting if someone fired it at you across a room. I just never knew just how painful they could be when applied at close range. This image shows the resulting stripe marks across my chest. A significant amount of screaming was involved in their creation. You can actually still see the bruising from the needles under them. I’ve seen plenty of femdom shots in office and school settings, but never have I seen the domme whip out a rubber band and start snapping it against flesh. They’re really missing out. I’ve still got the marks two weeks later.
I’d hate to leave everyone with the image of my bruised chest in their brains, so here’s a lovely spanking shot of Ms Savannah Sly from her site. She’s also on twitter here.
This very vore like image is actually a film poster from the 1970’s that someone has cropped and modified. You can see the original here. A site selling the original poster entitles it ‘Maraschino Cherry’ and credits the producer Radley Metzger. I’m sure the original 70’s flick was a lot less kinky that the poster suggests. In those days the advertising of pornography and the actual pornography in question often had little to no connection between them. Plus, I doubt the vore kink was on anyone’s radar in the 70’s porn industry.
After all that recent verbiage on kinky thought experiments, I think its time to get back to some basic femdom. This image is by the Los Angeles based Mark Dektor. He has an exhibition called ‘Switch’ that has just started at the Artist Corner Gallery in LA. As Isabella Sinclaire posted via her Instagram, he manages to create an amazing representation of the kinky world. Plus, he has shots of the fabulous Nina Hartley, which I think makes it instantly better than any other art exhibit, kinky or otherwise, that foolishly chooses to leave her out.
This is from this instagram post by Mark Dektor, and features Guerin Swing and Aine Patrick.
I spotted a few pro-dommes suggesting that tumblr blocking porn might be a good thing, as it’d remove a source of free porn and push more people to buy from content creators. That’s an interesting thought, and it’s hard to know how these kind of changes will play out, but it does seem to miss some aspects of the bigger picture. Firstly, tumblr was also used by sex workers to advertise and attract clients. With it gone, the only social media site still friendly to sex workers is twitter. That’s a precarious situation to be in. Secondly, I think the broader internet ecosystem for kinky content has helped dramatically increase the potential audience for kink.
It’s tempting to divide the world into kinky and vanilla people. In reality I think there are three groups. There’s obviously those who have zero interest in it and those who’ll always be active in it. In the middle, and possibly the largest group, are the potential kinksters. For these people the broad availability of kinky imagery and writing is a gateway. It draws them in with fantasies and ideas that they didn’t realize was their ‘thing’ until they saw it. Seeing someone act out their kinks normalizes the idea of trying your own.
I’d actually put myself in that middle category. I think I’ve always been kinky, even before I knew what sex or BDSM was, but I’m not sure I’d have ever truly discovered or explored my kinks without the internet. I couldn’t have imagined broaching the topic with a partner or calling an unknown pro-domme from a card in a phonebox. It was porn that expanded my imagination and kinky bloggers that made me realize that this was something I could try out for real.
Obviously tumblr removing adult content is not the same as it being removed from the internet. However, it was the largest and most user friendly of the porn hosting platforms. The more porn is pushed into the unfriendly corners of the internet, and the more it’s suppressed by search tools, the fewer conversions I think we’ll see from potential kinksters to actual kinksters. Which means fewer potentially kinky partners and fewer clients for pro-dommes.
These photographs are a great example of the kind of thing we risk losing. This is from Misingui’s tumblr, which features a lot of equally wonderful images. These two are from this post. Rigging is by Misungui, the model is Stan Briche and the photographer is Ludovica Anzaldi.
I’m sure most readers will have seen the news that tumblr is going to ban porn from December 17th. It’s depressing but, after their acquisition by Yahoo and then Verizon, not entirely surprising. I’ve written about the challenges of dealing with adult content in corporate environments in the past. As a relatively small independent platform with a history of being friendly to porn, tumblr would never have wanted to decimate its user base like this. For Verizon, its a case of cutting a fraction of users of one product in one division. The risk/reward calculation for them looks very different. Of course, that doesn’t make it any less a shitty and horrible thing to do to a community.
As Bacchus at ErosBlog has been pointing out for over a decade now, if you don’t own your domain and do your own hosting, you’re always going to be at risk of being screwed over by your platform of choice. Sadly that’s not really an answer for the average tumblr user. I’m lucky in having the time and resources needed to run a site like this one, but it’s definitely a non-trivial investment. The average tumblr user, who wants to post some hot photos and share some thoughts, isn’t going to want to spend an hour with tech support trying to figure out why his database has crashed and why /dev/dva1 has run out of space (as I did over the weekend).
Unfortunately, I don’t really know of a valid alternative that I can point people at. There are other platforms for sharing adult content (like imagefap and various tube/hub sites), but they tend to have horrible UI, dodgy advertising practices, poor community tools and a terrible attitude to content creators. If I had VC level money, I’d be treating this as an opportunity to create a new platform and fill a sudden gap in the market. As it is, I can only keep my eye open for somebody else doing that.
In the meantime, there are tools for archiving your favorite tumblrs. Bacchus has a post on one approach. I’ve had some luck using TumblrThree, although it’s not exactly a polished UI. There are also people working on more broadly archiving tumblr content for posterity. If anyone else has either suggestions for archiving content or for good places to move it to, feel free to leave a comment here. I’ll share updates and suggestions as the situation evolves.
My own image page is packed with tumblr links, so it looks like I’ll need to delete most of those next week. This particular image is via 11dutch tumblr. I believe that is Mistress Baton.
