Tag: Mainstream

Voters should have a safeword

So the grade A bullshit that is the FOSTA-SESTA bill (as covered previously here) was passed by the Senate this week. It’s a good indication of the level of dysfunction in American politics that while this dangerous bill was sailing through with no significant opposition, Senator Risch was holding up a one trillion dollar budget bill over the naming of a nature park after a political rival. Words fail me.

The effect was immediate. Craiglist dropped its entire personals section, reddit dropped sex related forums, CityVibe went dark, sex worker advertising forums vanished, etc. And that’s on day 1, before before the bill even becomes law.

It’s possible that you’re reading this and thinking ‘Why do I care? I don’t use any of those things.’ To you I’d firstly say ‘Don’t be such an asshole. Don’t you care about anyone other than yourself?’ This is a bill that’s going to cause active harm to many thousands of sex workers. Secondly, I’d say ‘Just wait. Stuff you do care about is going to follow closely behind.’

My prediction is that in the near future a grandstanding prosecutor is going to pick on some sex workers and claim (incorrectly) that they’ve been trafficked. Then he’ll use this law to go after whatever social media or online sites these workers have used or posted on. The facts won’t matter – just some juicy headlines about his crackdown on online filth and human misery. At which point all sorts of online platforms – twitter, tumblr, instagram, reddit, Google, etc. – will start to aggressively purge anything vaguely related to sex and kink. Or I guess I should say, ramp up their already aggressive efforts in that area. The effect on sex related speech will be chilling and widespread,

In theory the law shouldn’t affect sites like this one. In reality I rely hugely on those kind of platforms to provide interesting content and links. The majority of the images here feature sex workers of some form or another. This site literally wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been for my experiences playing with Lady Lydia – a professional dominatrix I found online.

Hopefully the constitutionality of the bill will be challenged in the courts. In the meantime, I’d suggest doing whatever you can to support any sex workers you interact with, make yourself aware of their perspective on the issue  and donate to organizations like SWOP and EFF.

It’s a shame this lady wasn’t on the floor of the Senate to knock some sense into people.

Bubbles of Intimacy

This Business Insider article describes a photographic project capturing couples in intimate moments. The twist in the tale is that they all feature the photographer Marie Hyld,  and a stranger she’s met for the first time just minutes before (as recorded in the corner of the photographs). Most of the shots are fairly conventional sweet/casual/romantic moments, but there’s one fun fetishistic one I’ve featured below.

Mistress Matisse made an insightful comment on the series via a tweet…

So, this photographer is basically tapping into the dynamic that many sex workers create, only she’s doing it in a performative way, instead of it being for the person she’s with.

I have to admit that when I started playing with pro-dommes I was puzzled by the nature of the dynamic. It felt genuine but was also in a sense artificial. Intimacy between relative strangers. Nobody was pretending, but we were also suspending disbelief. Was it real? Or fake?

In the end I decided that these were the wrong questions to ask. It was what it was. A little bubble in time and space. It was genuine of itself, and incomparable to anything else. I didn’t have to try and sort it into my existing categorizations. I could carve out an entirely new space for it.

The series of photographs is called lifeconstructions and can be seen on the photographers web site.

On the hook

Normally when I find or, as in this case, I’m sent an interesting image, I hang onto it until there’s a suitable article or post topic to associate it with. I’ve got a long backlog of images that I like but I’ve yet to find the perfect post to drop them into.

In this case, I’m just going to put the image out there and let it stand alone. I love it. Their expressions are perfect. I just can’t imagine any kind of kinky rant, sexual politics, scene dynamics or mainstream kink story I’ll be able to fit it into. It’s just a thing all of its own.

This is by the artist Miles Aldridge and was shot for the German Stern Magazine. Thanks to Marga and Titia for pointing me at it.

The Cully Flaug’d

Stumbling across this picture on twitter sent me off hunting for some background details, which led me to this British Museum page. The curator’s lengthy comment on it (click to ‘More’ to expand) are fascinating and also very British. The caption reads….

What Drudgery’s here, what Bridewell-like Correction!
To bring an Old Man, to an Insurrection.
Firk on Fair Lady, Flaug the Fumblers Thighs,
Without such Conjuring th’ Devil will not rise

I think the description of a man having difficulty getting it up as a ‘fumbler’ is a poetic but cutting one. I’m also going to be temped to describe my future erections as the ‘Devil Rising’.

According to the curator, the setting indicates a brothel or ‘flogging school’ and the coins behind indicate a service being paid for. Which I think means that this image, created sometime between 1674 and 1702, is one of the earliest of a pro-domme at work in her playspace. I guess we can be grateful that the fashion for portraying the domme as haughtily staring down at the viewer hadn’t yet caught on in 17th century femdom porn.

FOSTA-SESTA

The post title isn’t a result of me falling asleep on top of my keyboard. It’s actually the name of terrible bill that’s going before the US Senate in a few days. I first wrote about Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) back in November of last year.  Since then the bill has jammed together with another bad bill (FOSTA) and was passed by the House. Now if it clears the hurdle of the Senate, it’ll certainly go into law.

As I wrote last time, it’s a troubling bill for anyone supporting free speech online, and a dangerous bill for sex workers. It conflates sex work with sex trafficking and then makes websites liable if they’re seen to facilitate it. This will push media platforms and sites to banish sex workers (or anyone vaguely connected to them), in turn making it harder for them to find and screen clients, or share information about dangerous ones. Given the imprecision of the law and the skittishness of tech companies on the subject of sex, it’s liable to have a huge chilling effect on discussing sex and kink online.

If you want to know more there are some good articles here and here. The bill’s so bad it has brought together such disparate groups as the Wall Street Journal, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, pretty much every sex worker online and even the Department of Justice. If you follow any sex workers on twitter, you’ll have doubtless observed their concern. For example, Conner Habib put up a good thread on it.

If you’re an American citizen, the absolutely best thing you can do is call your Senators and register your disapproval of the bill. If you’re unsure what to say then there’s a handy guide here and contact information here. You can do it from the comfort of your own armchair. While calling is the best way, if you absolutely can’t do that, then there’s an online form you can fill in here.

If you’re in any doubt about speaking out, then Mistress Blunt below, would like to make it clear that it’s an order. She doesn’t look like someone you really want to disobey.

Clamps in Cosmos

After the HuffPost’s 7 sex tips from dommes, Cosmo now brings us the 9 nipple clamps you should look into. Of course sex tips from Cosmos is nothing new – I’ve done my fair share of mocking them in the past. However, I think it’s indicative of how far BDSM has penetrated the mainstream that their nipple clamp article is a pretty straightforward and sane list of recommendations. A few years ago it would have been written in a giggly “Oh isn’t this so silly!’ style and given instructions for making your own with some sticky tape and an elastic band. I’m not holding my breath for a Cosmos article on urethral sounds or play piercing, but it’s still progress.

The article’s main fault is hiding something at the end that would be better called out right at the top.

Queen explains that when you remove the clamps and the blood starts rushing back to the nerves, it can be an even stronger sensation than when you first put them on. Damn!

Damn is about right. Taking them off can hurt a hell of a lot more than their initial application. In fact I find it’s often an inverse relationship. Spiky ones hurt a lot when applied, but they don’t cut the blood supply, so I don’t get that rush of pain at the end. The flatter, wider clamps numb nipples up quickly and lull me into a false sense of security. Then, when they come off, the rush of blood back to the nerves can be excruciating.

For his sake, let’s hope this gentleman doesn’t get distracted by his clamps and let the book drop. I suspect that would lead to more problems than sore nipples.

The watermark on the image has been cut off by someone, but I’m fairly certain this is from the CBT and Ballbusting site.

7 Sex Tips

Kinky sex tips from pro-dommes is a regular ‘go to’ for mainstream sites looking to attract clicks. They’re typically slapped together with little thought and I normally skip straight past them whenever they show up in my news feed. However, this one from the HuffPost, is actually pretty good. It features some of LA’s top pro-dommes, and the advice is both well written and well thought out.

I particularly like the suggestions by Mistress Iris to take orgasms off the table and not to be afraid to experiment and play around with roles. There’s no right way to explore kink and very little in life works out perfectly the first time you try it. Trial and error is part of life. Yet, with sex, we often get hung up on always achieving a specific sticky end result.

It might seem basic to some of my more jaded readers. But I find it’s often worth revisiting the basics. They’re important and easily forgotten.

This artwork, by the inimitable Sardax, is Mistress Georgia Payne, one of the dommes interviewed for the article.

Beware Hijackers

This is, for the moment at least, my last mainstream and political themed post. I promise that normal service of more explicit femdom topics will be resumed shortly. We thank you for your patience.

Writing yesterday’s post, featuring Ross Douthat subverting #MeToo for his own political agenda, reminded me of this New Yorker article from last year on sex and consent. I didn’t link to it when it was published because I thought it was problematic in some areas, but its underlying point is a sound one. It argues that while consent is a fundamental issue, the definition is often fought over. By way of example, it highlights the two sides in the feminist sex debate of the 70’s and 80’s…

One side argued that no consensual act should be punishable by either law or social sanction. The other side focussed on the limits of consent, arguing that consent was sometimes—or even most often—not entirely freely given, and that some things, like injury sustained during S & M sex, could not be the object of consent.

#MeToo has put the subject of consent front and center in the mainstream debate on sex. As kinksters we should be glad about that. It’s a topic we’re well versed in. Unfortunately, operating in the spirit of never letting a crisis go to waste, political movements will inevitably try to subvert that discussion to their own ends. Mr Douthat is only the start of that.

One approach is to narrow the qualifications for consent so as to make it meaningless. Assert that any power imbalance renders consent meaningless. Given the endless variations of power through society – gender, race, wealth, culture, class – that quickly puts 99% of relationships outside the consensual boundary.

The other approach is to claim that consent can only be given by people of a sound mind, and that certain activities by definition indicate an unsound mind. This is the perfect catch-22. You’re free to do whatever you want, but if you agree to consent to BDSM, then you must be crazy, and therefore can’t consent.

If you want an active example of this kind of mentality in action, just look to the laws on sex work in Sweden. Sex work there is treated as a pathology that’s impossible to consent to. For example, Eva-Marree, an outspoken sex worker, lost her children because the system claimed she lacked insight and didn’t realize what she was doing was a form of self-harm. Consensual sex work was ruled to invalidate her ability to consent. Her children were placed with her ex, who then stabbed her to death when she went to visit them.

Consent is clearly a critical issue, but we need to be wary of people trying to redefine it or hijack it for their own political purposes. When a concept becomes powerful, it’s inevitable fuckheads will appear to try and exploit it.

This is Claire Adams and Eurosex shooting for kink.com. They’re clearly both crazy and need to be stopped for their own sake.

More Mainstream Porn stupidity

While I’m on the subject of stupidity and porn, as I was just a couple of posts ago, I should tip my hat in the direction of the NY Times. They’ve had a couple of recent articles that would fit under that umbrella.

To be fair to the first one – What Teenagers Are Learning From Online Porn – it’s hard to tell if the problem stems from the article itself or the porn education classes it’s reporting on. Possibly a little of both. It feels terribly dated, and that impression isn’t helped by the pictures that look like they’re taken from 80’s VHS tapes. Sexuality and pornography are incredibly complicated and interesting topics. Deconstructing porn and understanding how/why people use it and make it should be a fascinating area to dive into. Instead this turned it into ‘Porn isn’t real and can be bad, m-kay?’

The real stupidity comes with Ross Douthat’s column ‘Let’s Ban Porn‘. I might not agree with the title’s sentiment, but it’s a defensible one from a particular moral viewpoint. The stupidity comes when he tries to tie it to the #MeToo movement. Apparently widespread pornography has led to a lot of men who think it’s OK to sexually assault women because they’ve seen it in porn. It’s wrapped in a lot of bullshit and accompanied by much fact free hand waving, but that’s the heart of his point.

A slightly more fact based observer might note that men have being doing this shit for decades before the internet was invented. The key enablers appear to have been men in positions of power, with companies and social structures that covered for them, and a society that actively punished people for speaking up about assault. There have been some truly piss poor excuses offered by some of the men called out, but I haven’t seen any stoop so low as to blame internet porn. I’m sure they would if they thought they could get away with it.

A man trying to re-purpose #MeToo from a story about women speaking up about sexual assault into a way to push your personal politics is pretty obnoxious. And blaming internet porn for some men’s terrible behavior is a stupid as blaming comic books, rap music, movies or videogames for violence in society. Oh wait…

I guess if Ross Douthat was right, then publishing this kind of filthy pornography would actually be contributing to future sexual assaults. I guess it’s therefore a good job he’s got his head up his ass.

Updated: Thanks to a helpful comment, I can attribute this to Goddess Serena, a UK based pro-domme.