Tag: Mainstream

Cherub Season

Valentine’s day is upon us once more. An occasion that creates stress for couples and depression for single people. I think it’s second only to New Year’s Eve in my list of events that are far less enjoyably than their advertising would lead you to believe. If I ever spot a winged cherub with a bow and arrow, it better hope I don’t have a bottle of insecticide handy.

Of course, one can always find a silver lining to any cloud. In this case Dr Kate Lister has shared a great article on how Valentine’s day is really about whipping. I think that’s a fine idea to build on. Every restaurant that jams in extra tables and doubles their prices for Valentines should also include a flogger with the menu. A restaurant full of couples smooching, drinking champagne and beating each other would be an instant hit.

This beautiful wax rose is from a series called Roses by Brooke Didonato.

5 bed, 2.5 bath, 1 dungeon

My social media has recently been full of the story of a real estate listing for a house just outside Philadelphia with a large and well equipped kinky basement space. Sadly Zillow and Redfin have both removed the interesting photographs from the listing, but this Vice article managed to capture them before they were pulled.

What I particularly liked was this interview with the Realtor – Melissa Leonard. I’m not sure I want to buy a house in this location, despite how amazingly cheap it seems compared to Seattle, but I’d love to use Melissa on any real estate deal I need to do. She definitely has the chutzpah you need in a negotiation.

The other thing that made me smile was all the mainstream non-kinky people commenting that it was a real faux-pas to have a white dungeon. As I’ve posted here in the past, for a lot of kinky people, white is the new black.

While I wouldn’t knock the color scheme, the placement of the whipping frame here seems kind of odd. It’s an interesting pentagram design, but there doesn’t seem run to swing a single tail properly. Hopefully the new owner will swap it with the spanking bench from the main room, which I think would be a far more logical use of the space.

AOC

99% of my brain tells me I shouldn’t post this image. Firstly, posting anything vaguely political tends to turn people off. I’ve still got a long unfinished comment thread I need to get back to from the last time I ventured in that direction. Secondly, women in politics have to face all sorts of double standards about their looks and attitude that men never have to deal with. I’m not sure me posting this image in the context of this blog really helps with that problem.

However, apparently the remaining 1% of my brain happens to be the bit in charge of blogging right now, so here we have it. While I think Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez does look great here, what really makes it are the expressions of the guys on the right. I think they’re having what I’d call ‘complicated’ thoughts.

This is actually a crop (found on social media) of this larger shot, featuring Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez arriving at the State of the Union with her guest  Ana Maria Archila.

Top of the Pops

The LA Weekly has published an interesting list of their top 10 fetish inspired bands. I have to admit that while I’d heard of the more obvious ones like NOFX, Genitorturers and Adam and the Ants, most of the list was new to me. I was particularly intrigued to learn that there used to be a Portland punk band called ‘The Submissives’ who wrote exclusively about femdom. Sadly they only released one album before their guitarist ‘Pig Champion’ passed away. You can listen to the album here. As a punk and thrash fan I kind of like it, but I will concede it’s definitely a niche taste. Fans of romantic ballads should steer clear.

This is an image of Gen, the lead singer from the Genitortures. They’re currently touring with another of the bands from the LA Weekly list – the Lords of Acid. You can catch them both via the Pretty in Kink tour.

A Small Dose of Sanity

I spend a lot of time on this blog writing about censorship and stupid regressive laws against sex and sexual expression. It therefore makes me happy to share a rare instance of legal common sense. Amazingly, it’s from the UK, where the obscenity laws have been revised to allow depictions of BDSM, watersports, fisting, face sitting, etc. 

In recent years the UK has been leading the way in the crusade against pornography, so it’s heartening to see some small amount of sanity return. Credit to Myles Jackman and Pandora Blake for all their work and activism in this area.

In the circumstances, it seems only fitting to feature an image from Pandora’s own Dreams Of Spanking site. This is from a scene call The Training of Tai Crimson.

A Brief but Very Expensive Session

I really enjoyed the Wonder Woman movie, but the panels below make me think I should also investigate some of the more recent comics. It’s from Sensation Comics featuring Wonder Woman #20 and you can see more of the surrounding panels from this scene here. It seems to be a very fun take on the character. Of course thanks to FOSTA, Craigslist has already dropped its personals section, so I guess a major felony is now the only way to get beaten up by Wonder Woman. So much for these new laws cutting down on crime.

I originally found this via a tweet from Alice in BondageLand.

The Secret of German Football Success

Imke Wübbenhorst is a professional football manager in Germany, and the first woman to coach a men’s team at the fifth division level. As a former player for the U-19 German national team I’m sure she has many of the attributes needed to make a good coach. One of them is clearly not taking any shit from journalists. In response to a stupid question about wearing a siren so the men might know when she’s approaching the locker room, she came back with:

Of course not. I am a pro. I pick [my team] on dick length.

I just hope the next player she drops from the team has a thing for SPH. Because I’m pretty certain his team mates are going to being making the obvious joke about why he didn’t make the cut.

Crack the Whip

This is the model Rosie Huntington-Whiteley shot by British photographer Rankin. The odd thing is that this version of the image, which I believe is the original one, isn’t the one that has been widely shared. That would be this cropped and color modified version that I originally found. I guess people are happy to trade bad composition for a closer look at Ms Huntington-Whiteley.

This is from a book by Rankin called Ten Time Rosie shot in 2010.

A Trio of Asian-American Dominatrixes

Allure magazine has an interesting article on three Asian-American dommes. It features Mistress Lucy Sweetkill, Domina Dia Dynasty and Yin Q, and describes some of their experiences dealing with the stereotypes that come with the job and their ethnicity.

Even at her former job in fashion, Lucy’s employees would refer to her as a “dragon lady,” in both an endearing and negative way. She likes the association. “Yes, that’s definitely me. I’m a boss ass bitch,” Lucy says proudly. The association certainly helps in her positionality as a dominatrix and sex worker: She says her clients fear her.

I think the article does a pretty good job of describing BDSM and kink to its non-kinky readers, while also still giving some interesting perspectives to those of us who frequent sites like this one.

Although the online version is in Allure magazine, the article was originally published in Banana Magazine, issue 4.

Meet the New Boss

There was a new US Congress sworn in today. I think the political system here is too dysfunctional to hope for any significant change, but there was one statistic that caught my eye. In 1989 there were 16 Democratic women in the US House of Representatives. This year there are 89. Admittedly that’s still only 37% of the 235 Democratic seats they currently hold, but it’s still progress to be welcomed. Of course over the same period the Republicans have gone from a total of 13 women to – wait for it – 13 women. So not so much progress on that front. I think whatever your politics, if you regularly read this blog, you should welcome more women to positions of power and influence.

The image below is Kyrsten Sinema being sworn in to the Senate by Mike Pence. She’s the first openly bisexual woman to serve in the Senate and was sworn in on a law book, rather than a religious book.  I think those facts are both great. That fact Mike Pence would undoubtedly hate them makes the moment even better. And, I don’t to be shallow about this important moment, but she has also looks fantastic.