Food for thought

A new year of femdom blogging is opening up before me. So what better way to get going than with some articles on a man who fantasies about killing and eating women? Not exactly femdom I know. If fact, about as far from femdom as you can get. However, the story does raise some important issues around fantasies and on-line behavior that are worth pondering.

The man in question is Gilberto Valle, a former NYC cop. He frequented fetish websites and chat rooms where he shared some very dark discussions around torture, murder and cannibalism. More problematically he used the names and photographs of his wife and female friends in these discussions. When his wife found out she was understandably horrified and told the police. He claimed the discussions were all fantasies. They claimed they were a conspiracy to commit a heinous crime. The jury believed the police and found him guilty. That conviction was then overturned by the judge who said he couldn’t be found guilty for a ‘thought crime’.

There’s a good article on the case, written just after his conviction, available from the New York Magazine. Slate has a follow-up interview with him after he was released. What prompted this post was a fascinating HBO documentary on the case called ‘Though Crimes’. I watched it last week and it raises some really interesting issues around how lines can be drawn between fantasy and reality. If you’re in the US and have HBO on-demand, it’s currently available there.

A key part of the goverment case centered on his Google searches. For a crime to take place there has to be intent – a substantial step taken towards committing it. In this case, lacking hard physical evidence, his searches were taken as evidence of intent. That’s a pretty scary jump to make. The barrier between having a thought and expressing it to a search engine is almost non-existent. How do you distinguish between the intent of someone trying to create a realistic fantasy and the intent to carry out that fantasy? How many of us would like to explain our search histories to the world? Or to defend them to a prosecutor trying to cast them in the worst possible light?

The law has evolved based on the physical world, where actions have costs in time/money/effort. That tells us more about intent. I don’t have much sympathy for the conviction of Chris Asch, one of the people involved in the online discussion, who amassed a very scary collection of tools. You don’t need to own a stun gun to write a good fantasy about using one. But the online would has essentially zero barrier to actions like searching, typing or clicking. One can only hope the law can evolve to incorporate this fact. An online search is much more like a thought than an action.

I generally think that incorporating real people into sexual or violent stories without their knowledge is pretty unpleasant and unethical. But if my opinion doesn’t sway you, and you write about dark non-consensual fantasies online, then keep this case in mind. If you end up as next weeks headlines, it might suck to be thought sick and weird, but that’s definitely better than adding dangerous and criminal into the mix.

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Incoming rant

I apologize in advance for this post. Not for the opinions it expresses, but because it’s light on femdom and mostly me ranting. However, I figure it’s my blog, and I’m entitled to the occasional self-indulgence now and again.

A couple of weeks ago I covered the story of Stoya and her accusation of rape against her former partner James Deen. Since then multiple other women have come forward with more accusations of consent violation (I believe 8 is the current count) and porn companies have cut their ties with him. In general the response has been very supportive of Stoya.

Unfortunately, there’s one particular comment that regularly gets trotted out in these conversations that drives me nuts. It’s the one that declares he’s innocent until proven guilty and that we shouldn’t be making a judgement until he has had his chance to defend himself in court. Phrases like ‘vigilante justice’ and ‘social media witch hunt’ often get cited. What’s particularly galling is that these people often seem to assume that they’re occupying the moral high ground. Everyone else is picking sides but they’re claiming a higher position and upholding the standards of justice and fairness that are the hallmarks of a civilized society. That attitude is, quite frankly, total horseshit.

In this situation there are only three possible positions. You can choose to disengage from the debate, skip the articles on it and venture no opinion. You can choose to believe James. You can choose to believe Stoya. That’s it. End of options. Saying that he is innocent until proven guilty is to say by default you believe him over Stoya (and all the other women). You could equally choose to believe Stoya until he can prove otherwise. The former position is not automatically a neutral or morally superior one. Yes, it sucks that it’s his word against hers (and hers and hers and…). It would be great to have solid irrefutable proof of what happened. But unfortunately life sometimes gives you shitty options to choose between. So suck it up.

Assuming innocence until proven otherwise is great if we’re talking about jailing someone, but it’s a hopeless way to try and navigate through life. If a friend comes to me and says his partner violated his consent I don’t get the luxury of saying – “Well I’m sorry to hear that. And maybe it’s true, but obviously it’s not proven. Why don’t we get 12 of our friends together and let’s see if you can prove it to them beyond reasonable doubt? Then I’ll be able to take it seriously.”

I’m not saying we should automatically believe all accusations regardless of context or the individuals involved. Or that Deen should be jailed based on a twitter poll. Or even that you have to believe Stoya (although that’s my position). Just don’t try and pretend that putting the burden of proof entirely on the accuser is the morally superior position. Life isn’t black and white, and isn’t conducted in a courtroom.

I’m not really sure what image should accompany this kind of post. I guess a powerful Amazonian warrior works as well as anything, so here you go. This is by SurenProPhotography.

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Being informed

I don’t feature Stoya very often on this blog, despite having a minor crush on her. She has a shining intelligence (clearly visible in her blog and tumblr), coupled with elegant and classically beautiful looks. Unfortunately, from the perspective of this blog at least, most of her films are either straight sex or skewed more towards a M/f dynamic. Hence, I rarely have an opportunity to post about her. Given the circumstances of this particular post, I really wish that could have continued to be the case.

She’s just published via her twitter account that her ex-boyfriend and occasional co-star James Deen had previously raped her. Given it’s just a couple of tweets there’s obviously limited detail, but she accuses him of physically assaulting her and ignoring her safeword. I’ve read negative comments about his attitude and approach to consent from other actresses in the past, but never anything quite as clear and unambiguous as this.

The reason I bring it up here is because I think it’s beholden to anyone who looks at pornography to be informed about how it’s made and who is involved. Some anti-porn people will claim that it can never be safely used, as you never know the circumstances in which it is made. That is, quite frankly, bullshit. I’ve no way of knowing about the person who made my shoes or stitched my shirt. Most things in life, from food through to electronics, come to us with very little background information. Occasionally there’s a scandal that makes the headlines, but most of us are blind to the source of 99% of what we consume.

Pornography, in contrast, is relatively easy to track. Actors and directors write blogs, post tweets, visit conventions and hold interviews. Some people visit sets and some companies conduct tours. That’s not to say all porn is made ethically and transparently. Like all part of life there are bad people doing bad things. But from a consumer point of view, it’s one of the easier industries to educate yourself about.

James Deen has made a lot of kinky porn over recent year, and has been featured regularly on the kink.com family of sites. Personally I’ll be avoiding any purchase that would potentially contribute to his bank account from now on. I can’t tell anyone else out there if they should follow suit. But at least if you’ve read this post you’ll be able to make a slightly more informed decision.

StoyaGiven the context of the post I didn’t want to feature a particularly sexually explicit image. This is Stoya modelling as Neil Gaiman’s Death character from the Sandman series.

Half a decade of perverted sexual practices

This blog is 5 years old today. Happy birthday and hip-hip-hooray!

Since it started in 2010 there have been 1,626 posts (an average of 6.5 posts per week), and 3,703 comments. I don’t find the age particularly amazing, but the number of posts and comments does shock me. If I guestimate 30 minutes to write a post, and assume a 8 hour work day, that’s around 20 work weeks of nothing but blogging from 9-5. Or, doing the maths another way, at a glass of wine per post, that’s 271 bottles of Bordeaux.

I started it originally because the blog I wanted to read didn’t exist. I therefore thought I could write something to entertain myself and maybe others like me. I also thought I could impress lots of dominant women with my wit and wisdom, and thereby attract many offers of kinky shenanigans. I’d rate my success as therefore a ‘maybe’ and a ‘maybe not so much’.

I’ll probably write some more thoughts about the last 5 years in coming posts. In the meantime I’ll finish with the kind of imagery that makes me glad to keep doing it. This is by Zemekiss Photography and was shot at the 2015 Vancouver Fetish Weekend. I found it on the Happy BDSM tumblr (where you can see other shots from the sequence). Happy people doing kinky stuff is a wonderful thing.

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I’m into leather

A picture of me with my primary school class popped up on my faceboook feed the other day. It was kind of a shock. Social media and facebook has anesthetized people to old friends and old images suddenly reappearing, but this reached back further than I’m used to. There was only 7 of us in the class, and it was a tiny school in the middle of the English countryside. Me in college or high school was still a variation on me today, but this little boy seemed a world away.

It put me in mind of the classic scene in Annie Hall featuring Alvey’s classmates telling the camera where they are today. Unlike the girl at the end of that clip, while I like leather, I can’t say I’m into it. I am into cock and ball torture, bondage, corporal punishment and piercing. And mummification, sounding, electrical play and golden showers. Not to mention breathplay, zippering, trampling and anal play. I guess the equivalent Annie Hall scene with the younger me wouldn’t have been quite so pithy.

I’m not unhappy about how I ended up. I’d much rather be mature and complex than old, dry and boring. But I do envy the innocence and simplicity of the young me, even if some of the early signs of kinks to come were already in place.

SqueezeTalking of cock and ball torture, here’s someone indulging in at least 50% of that particular kink.

Hero

The concept of heroism has been much debased in popular culture. Pretty much anyone who has survived a stressful or dangerous situation is described as heroic. The popular media really only has two categories – hero and villain, so hyperbole is inevitable.

To my mind heroism isn’t only about courage and fortitude, it’s also about personal sacrifice. It’s about making a choice, and doing something for others despite the cost. It’s about taking a risk for a worthy cause. With that in mind I give you the heroic lawyer – Myles Jackman.

As this long article makes clear he’s fighting for the idea that “people’s private sexuality should not be held against them in any way, whether it’s criminal, civil, for intelligence purposes, or whatever”. As an obviously highly intelligent and well qualified man he could choose to make a bunch of money in more conventional legal cases and practice his kink in private. As a wealthy white educated male it’s unlikely he’d ever face problems doing that. Yet at significant personal and financial cost he chooses to defend people caught up in Britain’s ridiculous and outdated obscenity laws. That seems pretty heroic to me.

I’ve actually previously posted on a number of the cases mentioned in the article itself. There was the crazy tiger porn story, the Michael Peacock case, the Simon Walsh case, and the impact of the new UK censorship laws (here and here). Since those posts were written the new laws have forced Pandora Blake to close her Dreams of Spanking site, thereby putting a successful female producer out of business while reducing the total amount of porn on the Internet by 0.00%. It’s clear from the article that even those that win their cases often end up with their lives in pieces, and I sadly suspect that Myles Jackman is going to be a busy man for a long while yet.

UCSCThe image is from the Urban Chick Supremacy Cell – a femdom site with a little more attitude than most. It’s run by by Itzi Urrutia. She’s quoted in the article and has already successfully battled the UK government. You can access her clips store here.

Negotiation in the moment (cont)

A few additional thoughts struck me while I was publishing yesterday’s post. Nothing new or contradictory here. Just extensions of the previous ideas.

Firstly, as a piece of advice, I’d suggest that it’s important to avoid leading questions when negotiating consent in scenes. If the submissive is already awash in endorphins and mentally predisposed to agree with the domme, then leading questions are problematic. Saying something like “Is it OK if we do X?” doesn’t help the submissive make the necessary mental gear shifts. The subtext is the domme would like to do X. Instead say something like “Is it OK if I do X or would you rather we avoid it?” That gives a nice simple binary choice (important when someone might be endorphin clouded) and suggests that yes or no or equally valid answers.

Secondly, I’d like to be clear that the onus isn’t always on the domme to negotiate every single activity every single time. I’ve actually been in the situation Miss Margo described in her post – anal penetration when tied up and we hadn’t discussed it – and it wasn’t an issue at all for me. That was because I was playing with someone I was very familiar with and we’d already done bondage and anal play multiple times in past sessions. In those cases I think it’s down to the submissive to take things off the table that a reasonable person might assume were still on the table. If anal play is usually OK but I have an iffy stomach one day, it’s down to me to mention it either beforehand or when the strap-on comes out. I shouldn’t expect the domme to mind read that something previously fine is now an issue.

One final point I wanted to make was actually touched on by Miss Margo in a comment she left to the post. Namely that it’s easier to achieve a great headspace when you trust the domme to negotiate clearly. If I constantly have to parse her questions and try and determine are we negotiating or playing then it’s hard to relax. Similarly if I know she’s liable to try new things and the onus is on me to stop them, then I’ll always be asking myself if I’m OK with the progression of the scene. Conversely if I know she’ll step out of character as necessary and ask simple questions then it makes it much easier to zone out when she’s in character. I wrote last week about taking a ‘holiday from yourself‘ during intense scenes. I think that’s only possible when you can fully relax and trust the person you’re with.

HappyPeggingGiven anal play got mentioned several times it seems appropriate to finish with this image. I’m afraid I don’t have a source for it. I found it via the Pegging with a Smile tumblr.

Negotiation in the moment

Miss Margo recently put up a post that got me thinking about scene negotiation. The original post was about a complete absence of negotiation and a bad domme acting non-consensually. I’m not going to talk about that particular angle, as I’ve nothing really to add. If you’re destroying trust and traumatizing your play partners, as seemed to be the case Miss Margo describes, then clearly things are pretty fucked up. Instead I want to look at it from a more positive point of view: How do people negotiate consent effectively within a scene?

Obviously it’s always good to establish limits and boundaries before clothes come off and the whips come out. But it’s not always possible to cover every possible option. A scene is a fluid thing, with an energy of its own. Most people don’t want to script out exactly what will happen. So how do deal with the unknowns and getting consent when rope is flying? I’ve personally experienced 3 general approaches from dommes…

  1. Assume consent, but go slowly with check-ins, and give the submissive plenty of time to stop the action if they’re uncomfortable.
  2. Get consent by asking the question, but do so very much in the context and mood of the scene. I remember one time being asked in a very sultry voice – “Are all these holes mine to fuck?” An affirmative response in that case led to a set of urethral sounds appearing.
  3. Mentally step away from the scene and pose the question in a very straightforward way. This is a big gear change, pulling everyone back into the pre-scene negotiation mood, before switching back into the scene dynamic. In this case the domme might pose the question as “Hey. Quick timeout. It just occurred to me we could incorporate X. Would that be OK, or would you rather not do that?”

I’m sure a lot of people would frown on (1), but I do understand the thinking behind it. In fact it’s the same thinking as (2). It’s trying to maintain the dynamic of the scene. Dommes want to walk the line between negotiation and maintaining the submissive headspace they’ve spent time creating. Sadly, while I understand the desire to do this, I think it’s a big mistake. The right way to go for me is always (3).

In a scene the submissive is typically predisposed to try and obey instructions and help the dominant. That makes it hard to respond to genuine questions that may require a negative response. Whatever happens somebody has to change their mental headspace to deal with the question. It might seem that options (1) and (2) maintain the scene dynamic, but actually they force the submissive to mentally change gears without any help. And that’s hard. At least for me it is.

With approach (3) the domme takes the responsibility to temporarily change the dynamic, as befits her role. It’s easy for her to pull the dynamic back to a discussion of equals before plunging back into the play. I’ve never had a problem getting my headspace back in those situations. I’ve had real problems with negotiations that caught me unawares and left me second guessing my responses.

SoundingSince I mentioned using sounds as a situation where I’ve encountered this kind of on the fly negotiation, it seems appropriate to finish with this image. Given he can’t see what’s coming, I’m hope they discussed it ahead of time. I’m afraid I don’t have a source for this image.

A holiday from yourself

Yesterday’s post about ‘play acting’ got me thinking more about personas and how we constantly project partial elements of our personalities into the world. It struck me that intense BDSM play represents an almost unique situation in that regard.

I’m someone whose is constantly debating and editing myself. That’s not to say I’m insincere or fake. It’s just that my brain is constantly running and adjusting to the world around me. I like to analyze, pick out subtext and fine tune how I present to the world. I think most people do the same thing, either consciously or subconsciously. Unless someone is a totally self-centered jerk, there’s always a desire to understand how we’re being perceived by others.

The one and only time I think that’s not true is during intense BDSM play. When I’m tied down and being beaten there’s no room in my brain for analysis or reflection. When a needle starts to slip into my skin my only thought is to that sharp slippery sensation of pain. When nipple clamps are ripped away all that matters is the rush of blood and the tingling nerves. The combination of mental submission (which removes choice) and physical pain (which removes thinking) makes for a holiday from the self.

I wouldn’t say that my persona in those intense moments is somehow more true or real than my day to day one. Nobody beating my naked ass is getting to somehow learn the secrets of the inner me. But those are the times when I can forget about my persona and how I’m perceived, and just be in that very physical pure moment.

I’ll finish with an image of someone very much in an intense physical moment. I’d guess the only thing on his mind right now involves those nipple clamps and exactly when she’s going to tug them free.

IntenseMomentThis is from the Divine Bitches site.

Burke and Hare

Excuse me for a moment while I rant. I doubt it’ll do much good, but it will make me feel better. Given the time I spend on this blog, I figure it owes me the occasional indulgence.

The recent Amnesty proposal to decriminalize sex work (covered in this past post) has generated a lot of column inches in the press and a lot of stupid generalizations. It’s has also frequently featured a phrase I absolutely despise – ‘selling their bodies’. Let me state clearly that the only time a news article should be discussing the selling of bodies is if the profession concerned is grave robbery. In any other situation it’s completely fucking obnoxious.

It’s strange that anti-sex workers insist on objectifying the people they profess to care about so much. It’s almost as if they care more about their personal beliefs and morality than the people they claim to be helping. Perhaps Cindy McCain now thinks John owns her body after having sex, but there’s no reason to inflict her screwed up reasoning on the rest of us.

As an aside, I suspect anyone using this phrase has some deep rooted issues around sex. It seems to stem from the same kind of thinking that considers sex as a reductive act that somehow devalues and ‘uses’ up women. In everything else in life practice makes you better, yet somehow something that gives great pleasure, and almost everyone does, is the exception. John Oliver touched on this mentality brilliantly in a recent show.

Anyone who talks about sex workers selling their bodies should have to explain their reasoning to someone like Mistress Natsukiss (below). Then they should spend an hour or two ‘enjoying’ their purchase, and see just how in charge of her body they feel. I’d like to think she could beat some sense into them, but that’s probably too optimistic.

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I’ve featured Mistress Natsukiss in several previous posts, including here and here.