Tag: Fm

BDSMLR

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.

Needles and Rubber Bands

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.

Slurping her Cherry

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.

Mark Dektor – Switch

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.

More Tumblr Thoughts

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.

Bye Bye Tumblr

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.

The Two Kinkster Problem

I’ve finally got time to get back to my post from last week entitled ‘Pick a Side‘. That was all about the morals and ethics of certain kinky activities. Is it reasonable to cast some kinks as wrong or bad, while falling back on the argument of ‘as long as its consensual adults, its OK’  for other kinks?

I got some interesting comments, which prompted me to think more on the issue, and come up with a thought experiment. Let’s call it ‘The Two Kinster problem.’

Mistress Mary and Submissive Sam, both risk aware consensual adult kinksters, enter their own deserted, well equipped private playspace and close the door behind them. An hour later they emerge sweaty, breathless and happy. They both tell you that they had a great time, and you ask them what they did. At this point, is there anything they can say that’ll make you think they did something ethically or morally wrong?

There’s obviously no incorrect answer. I’m just curious what answers or comments readers might have to the question.

When it comes to philosophical questions, I only know of one famous philosopher with a femdom connection  – Aristotle. I’ve covered the story of him and Phyllis previously. This particular image of them is by the French painter Étienne Jeaurat.

Intermission

I had intended to write some followup thoughts to yesterday’s post. Unfortunately, I ended up spending too long in the kitchen tonight. The chicken escabeche, roast potatoes and spicy arugula salad that resulted was well worth it, but I ran out of blogging time. I’ll therefore offer up this rather lovely artwork by way of an intermission. This is by the Spanish artist Anna Dart.

Update: Via a comment Ferns pointed out that this is actually based on a photograph of David and Victoria Beckham. Oddly enough, I  featured that original photograph in a post just over a year ago.

The Pleasure Revolution

The Guardian has an interesting article on female sexual pleasure featuring five women speaking out on the topic. It packs in a lot of complex issues, and left me wanting to hear more from everyone interviewed. From the perspective of this blog, the most relevant voice was the last one featured, that of Reba Maybury. The article labels her as a dominatrix, but she seems to be part performance artist, part political agitator and part pro-domme. It’s hard to tell from the article if kink is an intrinsic part of her life or just an interesting tool for exploring power dynamics and gender politics.

What struck me as particularly odd was this section…

A socialist of mixed-race background, Maybury only dominates white, preferably right-wing, men. “I can’t force myself to be even fictionally cruel to any other type of man. It makes the performance a lot easier,” she says. “I could never be mean to someone who wasn’t white, because the world is run by white men, isn’t it?”

To a kinky submissive person such as myself that seems …. odd. Her white, right-wing male clients will doubtless enjoy being dominated. That is after all why they reach out to her. I’m sure being called selfish, disgusting, misogynistic assholes is exactly what some of them desire. On the other hand, a non-white or left-wing man who would also enjoy being dominated, has to go without. So she meets the needs of those she dislikes and withholds it from those she supports. That doesn’t seem optimal.

I think it’s absolutely possible to mix kink and progressive politics. For example, as I covered here with Mistress Couple and the Trump voters. I also love the idea of Dominatrix Maybury getting her right wing submissives to help her create a book whose profits go to sex workers. That’s a fabulous concept. But as she recognizes at the end of the article, our kinks and our politics align in complex ways and they don’t necessarily influence each other. If you want to punish wealthy white conservatives, then maybe don’t beat or humiliate them if that’s what makes their dicks hard?

I’m not sure who this man voted for, but he’s a white guy in a suit, so there’s at least a chance he matches up with Reba Maybury’s criteria. The sexy bondage here comes courtesy of the TS Seduction site.

Minds Eye

This striking but rather unusual image is by Berlin based photographer Pitt Prickel and  features Madame Curie. He’s entitled it “Prayer: In My Mind’s Eye” and I came across it via his original tweet.

I like it but find it oddly unsettling. I can browse past beaten torsos, genitals full of needles and guys being pooped on without a raised eyebrow. Yet somehow a man with an eyeball head mask praying to a domme in a decaying urban space gives me pause. I think its the Lynchian juxtaposition of the familiar, the eerie and the surreal that make it work.