Tag: Photograph

Public Play Concluded

Here’s my final post (for the moment) on the topic of public play.

One hard and bright line that’s often invoked is based on the idea of consent. Involving random strangers in your play without their consent is clearly violating some pretty basic BDSM norms. That’s a relatively easy call to make when it comes to physical or psychological involvement. If you’re getting off on strangers getting upset, then you’re getting off by violating their consent. A clear asshole move. But what happens when that’s not your intent, but people get upset anyway? At what point do you need to seek consent from someone?

This isn’t specifically a problem for kinky people. I was reminded of that when I spotted this story on some very well done but very gory Halloween decorations. As a kid, that front lawn scene would have traumatized the fuck out of me. I’d have had nightmares for months. Even now I find it unpleasant to look at closely. So at what point should that home owning Halloween fan have to seek the consent of his neighborhood? Or indeed the consent of anyone who might come down the public street outside his house? At what point should we constrain public freedom of expression? It clearly has to happen at some point, because there will always be someone who pushes a boundary to the breaking point.

I guess my bottom line is: Be wary of blanket statements or simple rules when it comes to public play. It’s always dependent on context and content. I think the leash scene from my original post was over the line, but the scene in the images in yesterdays post is completely fine. Yet it’s very hard to come up with a simple easily applied rule that separates the two.

This photograph represents the kind of ‘public’ play I could get behind. The feel of being outside and exposed, but a big closed door to keep the rest of the world out.

More Public Play

There’s one comparison that always annoys me when the topic of kinky public play comes up. Inevitably someone will liken it to gay people kissing or holding hands in public. Which is a stupid comparison. The problem of straight people complaining about that isn’t the act itself, it’s the double standard. A valid act for one group can’t suddenly become perverted if a different group does it. That’s obviously not analogous to leading a semi-naked slave on a leash through a public space. Nobody else is doing it and it’s very different to a simple hug or a kiss.

On the flipside I think it’s important to be wary of the idea of pleasing everyone when it comes to public behavior. There’s often a framing that suggests people need to compromise so that everyone can enjoy the space and nobody is upset. That’s not a compromise. That’s using the lowest common denominator to set the standard. It makes everyone conform to the most conservative person in the room. A true compromise is when you’re annoying an equal number of people at either extreme. That’s when you know you’ve got it right.

I’ve no idea where these shots were taken, but I do like the mix of expressions in the second shot. If they were aiming for public humiliation I think they failed, as most people in the crowd look to be having a great time.

On Her Way to Work

Just a regular morning start for your typical busy dominatrix. On her way to work clutching her trusty single tail. Those slaves aren’t going to whip themselves.

I suspect the identity of this leather clad lady has been lost to history. All the references I could find simply say generic things like ‘vintage dominatrix’.  If you can help me attribute it then please leave me a comment. I’d love to rescue her from anonymity.

Theophilus, the dirty dog

For anyone who enjoys the coarser parts of history, I recommend this thread on the graffiti found in the Roman city of Pompeii.  As the author – Marina Amaral – points out, people really haven’t changed a bit. My particular favorite was this one…

“Theophilus, don’t perform oral sex on girls against the city wall like a dog”

It’s an intriguing mental image. I’m assuming it doesn’t mean that the dogs of Pompeii were particularly licky, but that Theophilus liked to get down on all fours to perform the act. An early Roman example of a submissive perhaps?

This photograph is by the Ukrainian photographer Ruslan Lobanov (deviant art, instagram and artlimited site). Hopefully, a million tons of hot ash isn’t about to engulf this particular couple.

She’s Not Impressed

I’m never sure if it’s a blessing or a curse to find hotness in odd situations. Am I blessed to have an extra source of pleasure? Or cursed to be weird and out-of-step with the world?

Take for example the images below from Sienna Hunter.  I spotted them via this tweet she shared with the comment…

When he says he’s glad you didn’t dress in a sexy manner for the virtual date so he can focus on his thoughts

Now obviously she’s poking fun at a self-involved man with his foot very firmly lodged in his mouth. Also obviously, from what I can see, that is a very sexy outfit. However, I’m also blessed/cursed to find those expressions all sorts of hotness. It’s a heady blend of  bored, skeptical and “what kind of grade A bullshit is this?” I’d be mortified if someone I was with felt that way and couldn’t slap me about the head because of it, but love the idea of these expressions tied to a painful follow-up.

Sienna is a Toronto based professional companion. You can find her professional site here and her OnlyFans site here. She also creates a podcast called ‘The Escort: Deconstructed.’ I don’t see any indication she offers kinky services, although she clearly has a talent for subtle social humiliation.

Locktober to the Max

I’m continuing the metal bondage theme with this astonishing metal body cage owned by Amanda Wildefyre. Forget locking just the penis up – here’s a way to guarantee there’s no hanky-panky of any sort. It looks like it has been paired with an inflatable rubber body suit, just to really crank the confinement kink up to 11.

Amanda Wildefyre is a Minneapolis based pro-domme, with a really incredibly collection of equipment. If you can’t visit in person, then she also has a clips store here.

Lockdown (updated)

The rogue chastity device story was such a big one it feels like I should do a follow-up. It popped up all over the place. Something that the unfortunately trapped men will presumably not be doing anytime soon.

I may have been too optimistic about the ease of escaping the device, as I saw numerous online comments from people reporting being trapped for days. I guess in some ways that could be seen as selling point. Buy our device and you’ll be doing #locktober whether you like it or not.

Fortunately, there is a relatively easy escape route. Freddie Clegg’s humorous post on the subject linked me to this BBC article which suggests a screwdriver might be all that’s needed to escape. There’s a video for that trick on the companies site. The people who discovered the original flaws have another suggestion for escaping, described towards the bottom of this page.

As seems inevitable in any hacking story, Russians and bitcoin were also involved. Estelle Sinclair described an attempt to extort money from one of her submissives using the device. I guess if you imagine the Russian hacker as a icy cruel blonde Slavic lady, then that’d actually be kind of a hot scene. It’s just lucky the device didn’t come with a punishment setting capable of delivering electric shocks. That could have led to a few guys learning all about crypto-currencies in record time.

Finally, for anyone wanting a more serious deep dive into the issues here, the buttplug.io twitter feed has put up some lengthy threads on the topic. Worth checking out it you’re still intrigued by this kind of tech.

This is clearly a much more low-tech device that’s being inspected. I feel I should totally know the name of the two dommes in the image, but my brain is failing me. Hopefully a reader can help with the correct attribution.

Updated: Thanks to my ever knowledgeable readers I can attribute this to Lady Sophia Black and Ms Morrigan Hel.  I think it’s from a shoot for The English Mansion. 

Financial Blackmail

This post gives me an opportunity to pull together two of my recent themes – technology and financial domination. My path to this unholy union is via this Vice article on Mistress Harley. She’s a self-proclaimed Techdomme, dominating her clients via their dataspace. The information she gleans then feeds into kinks around humiliation, shame and consensual blackmail. Financial domination with a very sharp edge.

Personally, that kind of play scares the hell out of me, and not in a sexy way. It seems like extreme edge play. My data and computers are extensions of my brain and thoughts. Letting someone loose in them would feel like handing a amateur surgeon an ice pick and tell them to have a rummage in my perfrontal cortex. That’s not to kink shame, it’s just a very definite case of YKINMKBYKIOK.

That said, there are parts of the article that don’t seem quite so OK.

“I’ve definitely exposed people. I’ve posted dirty pictures of them on their Facebook or I’ve posted ‘I have a hot internet mistress’ along with a picture of myself.”

She’s also faked mental breakdowns on client’s profiles. She just starts with a simple post of “I’m not feeling well,” and as people respond in real time she begins to escalate up to something resembling schizophrenia.

That seems to violate rules around consent. Her client might have been OK with it, but what about the friends and family that see the pictures or get dragged into a fake  mental breakdown? Social media drama is bad enough, without later discovering that your friend is getting off on involving you in their fictional kinky storylines. Although if you begin to think about social media as being one huge humiliation scene, that does make a kind of sense.

If you are into financial and technical domination then Mistress Harley is clearly an expert. You can find her main site here, where she offers a wide variety of clips, customs and findomme options.

Shiny New Server

Welcome to the new server, same as the old server (hopefully). Migration has completed to the new set-up, but it should all look exactly the same to anyone reading. I lost one post in the process, but since that was just about starting serving migration, that’s no big deal. If you encounter any site issues, particular around comments, then please let me know. I think I’ve got everything configured correctly but it’s hard to be 100% sure.

As an aside, I think it’s amazing any of this stuff ever works at all. If you’re just browsing the web it all seems pretty solid, but under the covers there’s a hell of a lot of duct tape and bailing twine. This site runs on top of WordPress, which is a fairly complex piece of software. On top of that is a bunch of plugins, themes and widgets, all written by different people. WordPress itself is built on a bunch of other software products, like Apache, PHP, SQL, Perl, etc. A lot of those have their own plugins and customized tools, along with the UI that allows them to be configured. Underneath it all is the server itself (running a flavor of Linux) along with the various internet technologies like DNS, SSL, TCP, etc. that lets everything talk together. Everyone of these critical pieces is available in different versions, and almost every website you visit will be running all of them in some different combination of versions. Yet it incredibly all works, as shown by the fact your reading this.

The internet is arguable mankinds greatest achievement and certainly its most complex machine. The software that delivers this post to the screen of a smartphone has thousands of PhDs and millions of man hours of development behind it. And yet, here’s me using it to deliver sexy pictures of kinky people. I can’t think of a better use for all that time and effort.

I believe this particular sexy picture is of Skin Diamond shooting for Divine Bitches.