Tag: Mainstream

Love Swing

As a not-so-proud owner of an officially bad back, this kind of shot always makes me wince. I can’t imagine my physical therapist declaring it an approved way to stretch. On the plus side, this set-up does at least have a lot of padding for his wrists and ankles, making it better thought out than similar ones I’ve seen. He just better hope she doesn’t stand up and try pump the swing high like we used to do as kids.

I believe this is by the French visual artist Eric Madeleine in a series titled Corps-objet (Body Object).

No Basis for a System of Government

I have little love for the British royal family or the current Conservative government. However, I have to give a shout out to its member Penny Mordaunt for pulling off this look during the recent coronation. She’s not exactly the Lady of the Lake, but as sword wielding maidens go, she’s doing a fine job.

Apparently she sported the sword for 51 minutes which turns out to be quite a feat.  I’d never vote for her, but if any dragons show up and need slaying she might be just the woman for the job.

Movie Recap

One of the things lost in the big blog blowup was some posts on mainstream movies with femdom themes. I got a question from a reader about one of them, which made me think it’d be worth recapturing them in a post here.

The newest is Sanctuary, starring Margaret Qualley and Christopher Abbott. When first featured here it was just playing the indie festivals. Now there’s a new trailer out and it’s due for widespread US release in May. It’s billed as a drama / dark comedy and the reviews for it are looking good.

They / Them / Us is a 2021 movie starring Joey Slotnick and
Amy Hargreaves as divorced parents exploring kink. I don’t think it ever got a widespread release, but Amazon Prime subscribers can stream it for free.  You can read a review of it here.

Finally, there’s Love and Leashes from last year. This got a fair bit of positive coverage and likes on femdom Twitter when it first came out. Good to see a positive and generally happy portrayal of femdom in a mainstream movie. Netflix subscribers can stream it for free.

Apologies for repeating past posts, but I figured it was worth recapturing the lost links, particularly given that some of the movies are now more accessible than when first featured.

The Power

Fans of women with superpowers kicking ass – which I’d guess is a very large fraction of my readers- might be interested in a new Amazon Prime series: The Power. The premise is a society where young women develop the ability to manifest electricity at lethal levels, upending the balance of physical power between the genders.

I’ve not had chance to watch it yet, but you can read some reviews of the show here, here and here. They’re not all 100% positive, but the series seems to have some promise.  It’s based on a 2016 book by Naomi Alderman which did receive glowing reviews. One to add to the reading list.

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.

Kinky Models

The hot story in tech over the last few months has been ChatGPT. The latest in large language AI models, trained across vast swathes of internet data, it has been freaking people out with it’s ability to do a pretty good impression of a person.

Inevitably there have been endless attempts to make it do naughty things because, you know, humans. The makers are constantly tweaking its guard rails but with millions of ingenious monkeys tapping away at it, not to mention all kinds of adult material in its training data, there are always going to be scenarios they’ve not covered.

The latest example comes from Vice magazine, where a journalist managed to get it to indulge in some Femdom roleplay. As you might expect if you’ve seen any of the other ChatGPT examples, it manages to be impressive, weird and unsettling all at once. It started pretty well, with mention of consent and safewords, but ultimately veered off into some far more disturbing areas. Which, in fairness, is pretty representative of kinky writing on the internet.

The writers final conclusion seems an odd one to me…

The practice of BDSM is firmly rooted in principles of consent. Will large language models ever be nuanced enough to differentiate between non-consensual acts and taboo—but consensual—situations in BDSM role-play? These models’ overall lack of rigid ethical principles highlights a major risk inherent to their design.

Rigid ethical principles are undoubtedly necessary once you start letting AI affect the physical world. Nobody wants a Femdom android that doesn’t understand consent. But for creative writing purposes? Pretty certain there’s a huge amount of online kinky fiction that violates all sorts of BDSM principles and we didn’t need ChatGPT to come up with it.

This image is by Rabbika. You can find there twitter account here.

House Boss

According to a study from China, attractive women wield more power in their households. Basically as their perceived attractiveness increased, so did the likelihood that they were the major decision maker.

It’s not too surprising a result. Repeated studies have shown that attractive people are generally treated better. Beauty helps if you’re trying to get a job or trying to get away with crime. It’s therefore not unreasonable that it’d also help you gain power in a household.

What I found interesting was this line at the end of the article.

It is also possible that interviewers saw wealthier women and those with more self-esteem as more beautiful.

The attractiveness rating was assigned by interviewers, so was obviously subjective. It might be the case that attractive people get more freedom to make decisions. But it also might be true that more forceful and dominant women are seen as more beautiful. What’s cause and what’s effect? Are bossy women perceived as more beautiful or do beautiful women get more opportunity to be bossy?

I’m not sure who this is or where the shot is from, but she certainly seems like someone who might be in charge of things. Or if not yet, soon will be.

The Cramps

From one rock band that didn’t want to associate with kink to another that very much did – The Cramps. Pioneers of the psychobilly genre, they were clearly lovers of fetish, horror, sex, B movies and pop culture kitsch. You know. All the good stuff. Their guitarist Poison Ivy had worked as a Dominatrix and clearly has a love for fetishwear.

They recently had a moment in the mainstream, thanks to the Netflix show Wednesday and Jenna Ortega dancing to their song “Goo Goo Muck”. If you like that then there are plenty of Cramps song guides online. I’m partial to the overtly kinky Ultra Twist, off the album Flamejob.

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.