The Art of Rope Bottoming: Delano

This link is awesome because it points out the fact that bottoming actually does take skill. The vast majority of classes offered address only topping skills, which makes it look like bottoming is just a matter of lying there and taking it. Bottoms are *not* objects! It’s not easy to point out that your top is wrapping during a scene. It’s not easy to speak up when a scene just isn’t working for you. It’s not easy to make sure you give yourself the necessary care to make sure you don’t throw up/faint/get a terrible headache. All of those things really are skills and they matter.

BDSM’s Dirty Secret – The Real Risk of Kinky Sex

This is a subject near and dear to my heart. My favourite thing about kink is the intimacy of revealing the least socially acceptable parts of myself to another person and having them like it. I’ve said over and over that hitting someone and having them thank me for it never gets old. No fancy toy or technically flawless suspension can match that.

I can’t stand ‘forced’ feminization. Here are the big three reasons why:

1) It assumes that wearing panties is inherently humiliating. Being a woman, I generally wear panties – they’re a convenient way of keeping the seam of my pants from abrading my junk, and they don’t give me the unbelievable wedgies that boyshorts do (seriously, how do guys deal with wearing boxers?). It should surprise no-one that I’m just the slightest bit offended by the idea that the clothes I wear every day are humiliating. People have tried to argue that it’s not that the panties themselves are humiliating, but the fact that men aren’t supposed to do girly things like wear panties. Is the idea that *being* a woman is so awful that merely playacting it for the space of a scene is humiliating for a man seriously supposed to be *less* offensive? Seriously? Just fuck off.

2) It assumes that submission and femininity are the same thing. No they are not. Equating submission with femininity is what stupid people do because they can’t deal with the idea of a big strong man submitting to a wimpy little woman. Because the natural order of the universe is that men dominate and women submit, remember? Even in a subculture defined by its flouting of cultural norms (hitting people is bad, power differentials are bad, calling people names is bad, etc, etc), it’s vitally important that we continue to act out the exact same gender dynamics we see in the vanilla world. Why? Shut up, it just is. What, you don’t see the point of escaping one box just to climb into another one and lock it behind you?

3) It’s not forced. There’s a reason I insist on putting quotes around the forced part of ‘forced’ feminization. If your partner is actually forcing you to do things you don’t enjoy on any level that’s not kink, that’s abuse. I think it gets called ‘forced’ feminization because male cross-dressers have an understandably hard time coming to terms with their desire to cross-dress. I sympathize, but I am in no way interested in taking the blame. Same with ‘forced’ bi – if you want to suck some cock, great! I’m still not going to be the awful nasty woman who made you do that horrible dirty thing that you totally didn’t want to do and absolutely have not fantasized about for years.

Also, communication is kind of a big thing for me. Honesty is kind of a big part of communication. If you can’t be honest about what you want (no Mistress, I’d hate to wear your panties, it would be humiliating and I wouldn’t enjoy it at all, but it would make me feel really submissive), we just can’t communicate well enough to play together. It may be hot to be ‘forced’ to do things, but it’s absolutely not hot to accidentally harm someone because you couldn’t communicate clearly about what you both actually wanted.

To be clear, I’m not ranting about men who just enjoy cross-dressing, and work it into their scenes because it’s fun. I’m also not talking about men who enjoy playing with gender, and who might happen to use a scene as a safe space to do so. Because of my attraction to masculinity, those things don’t necessarily do it for me, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with them or that there are no women are turned on by gender-play. Acting like wearing women’s clothing or acting like a woman is inherently humiliating, on the other hand, is hugely offensive.

If you use fetlife, you need to read this post: http://maybemaimed.com/2011/08/08/backdoor-access-to-your-fetlife-profile-remained-open-permanently/. Knowing as little as I do about web application security, I didn’t realize fetlife’s security was nearly as bad as it is. Poor security isn’t nearly as sexy as shiny new features, but I think it’s far more important given that there’s currently no legal protection against discrimination on the basis of being kinky.

If you’d like to help pressure fetlife to fix their security here’s a handy link, conveniently lifted from maymay’s post: Write to privacy@fetlife.com and complain. Just click it, edit as you see fit, and hit send. I highly recommend reading maymay’s post, but if you just want to do something quick and easy to help, go with the link 🙂