Masterlock Street Cuffs.

I love bikes as well as BDSM (and when I say bikes I don’t mean women of easy virtue though I love those too). The problem with BDSM is that it’s almost as expensive as bikes. While titanium pedals don’t have to be upgraded every year – however much I crave the smell of new gear – even simple fetish gear costs a fortune. Worse still, most of it’s badly made and, if designed as a restraint, not up to much heavy duty use. If you do choose to invest in properly made equipment you face paying hundreds of dollars and the design is often hard to bear if you’re not a fan of the ‘retro dungeon’ look.

Enter Masterlock’s ‘Street Cuff’. Designed to keep bikes secure they’re better made and spec’d that 99% of BDSM gear and cost less than $70. There’s no one alive who could brute-force their way out of them and, with a little creative padding, are big enough to restrain wrists, arms, ankles or legs. They look badass – the design being more Jack Bauer than Justine, have ‘Master’ written on them, and are based on the design of police cuffs. Hardware for the hardcore if ever I saw it.

Popularity: 30% [?]

According to practitioners of Christian Domestic Discipline:

A Christian Domestic Discipline marriage is one that is set up according to Biblical standards; that is, the husband is the authority in the household. The wife is submissive to her husband as is fit in the Lord and her husband loves her as himself. He has the ultimate authority in his household, but it is tempered with the knowledge that he must answer to God for his actions and decisions. He has the authority to spank his wife for punishment, but in real CDD marriages this is taken very seriously and usually happens only rarely. CDD is so much more than just spanking. It is the husband loving the wife enough to guide and teach her, and the wife loving the husband enough to follow his leadership. A Christian marriage embodies true romance and a Christian man a true hero.

A cynic might say telling a woman she exists to cook, fuck and get spanked in the service of God – who on earth is conveniently delegating all discipline and pleasure to her husband – could be perverted by crazy people with less than Godly intentions. How the hell do these guys pull this off? I once told a date I was getting text-messages from the Thundercats telling me to chain her to the bed and give her a rum and coke enema and she called the police. Maybe I should have invested in some crotchless pantaloons and set the mood properly?

(If you find and CDD porn you know where to send it)

(via Metafilter)

Popularity: 29% [?]

If you’re prone to taking the old ‘no pain, no gain’ aphorism seriously Miss Candy might be the personal trainer you’ve been looking for. Unlike conventional fitness gurus who only hurt you by mistake, or if they enjoy it are paid to pretend they don’t, Candy make no bones (well probably just the one) about wanting to make you beg for mercy as she liquidizes your delts.

On her website the ’sweet sadist’ from Seattle (who’s also a Rat City Rollergirl) lists an hour of her company for $150, and that she doesn’t offer D/s services outside the gym environment. Compared to any other pay-for-play sexual thrills I’m aware of that’s a bargain. I sorta wish I liked getting my pulverized.

She won’t get close to your ass but she will train it and with Miss Candy on call every session has a happy ending. You pays your money…

Popularity: 36% [?]

Paysites aren’t often worth commending and fetish sites are typically more poorly put together than those is the mainstream (Ooh! Look at our scary black background!) which makes ‘Two Big Meanies‘ particularly worth a mention. They’ve got almost everything right.

They blog, so you can read about and understand the content they have without being forced to decipher a tour that’s probably an optimistic lie. They post large format video clips, saving you from having to pay to discover that no one in their employ knows how to hold a camera and, best of all, they make BDSM (more SM than BD in this case which is how I like it) seem sexy.

Rarely has a site featured so many smiling submissives clearly enjoying being ever so slightly wrong in the head*. Though the Meanies themselves look like Right Said Fred they’re more attractive and less creepy than the smoking-fat-dude-in-leather-chaps type prevalent elsewhere, and their clear ability to get turned on and desire their models makes for genuine chemistry. It’s refreshing to see BDSM presented as something sexy and loving, not tortured and degrading.

Unusually, and brilliantly, the Meanies sell everything in pieces. If you like the look of a posting you can pay for that download without having to spring for a subscription. Yes, it is ludicrously expensive if you are a more than occasional shopper, but that’s probably due to the billing methods they employ as much as them knowing people will happily pay through the nose for specialist jollies (which is the first rule of porn by the way).

Sites this good make the future of porn seem a little brighter, if you’re into kink you owe it to yourself to take a look – if only for the abundant freebies.

*I welcome your annoyed comments but wanting to get punched is mental, however arousing you find it. I’m kinky as you are, but if you want to stay on the right side of Virginia Tech you need to accept that being okay with being weird doesn’t make it any less… weird. Just my opinion.

(thanks Jill)

Popularity: 32% [?]

Zoe Margolis.

Zoe Margolis, who writes as Abby Lee, and is known as ‘Girl With a One Track Mind‘ has just been written up in the New Yorker. It’s not a full profile but it’s a first, and no mean one. Every publishing agent in America reads the New Yorker and in an industry which is controlled in New York, but depends on the mid-West, it’s the kind of publicity you need when trying to sell a book subtitled ‘Diary of a Sex Fiend’.

Interestingly the piece says nothing about her book or her writing, which means Zoe’s story is more interesting to the press than the book she’s written. Though it may sound offensive, it means she’s a proto-celebrity. Everyone who employs PR wants to reach a point where they’re more interesting that whatever they’re doing and they become a story themselves. When you can appear in the media just because you’re you promoting anything becomes vastly easier. I wonder if Zoe/Abby/The Girl’s going to capitalize on it?

Another New Yorker article which has just reached the web is a piece on Joel Surnow, the producer of ‘24‘, focused on the show’s use of torture and lack of realism.

It made me think immediately of the ever-present questions hanging over violent porn and BDSM. Sadists, who enjoy inflicting pain on willing submissives, are torturers working with the consent of their victims. In the New Yorker article, Joel Navarro, one of the F.B.I.’s top experts in questioning techniques, has this to say about torturers:

Only a psychopath can torture and be unaffected. You don’t want people like that in your organization. They are untrustworthy, and tend to have grotesque other problems.

So when does rough sex become psychopathic behavior?

According to Wikipedia (Wikipedia = truth by agreement) psychopaths are most commonly diagnosed using Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist-Revised (PCL-R) in which:

Hare describes psychopaths as “intraspecies predators who use charm, manipulation, intimidation, and violence to control others and to satisfy their own selfish needs. Lacking in conscience and in feelings for others, they cold-bloodedly take what they want and do as they please, violating social norms and expectations without the slightest sense of guilt or regret.”

Can you be a sadist without being psychopathic? If not should we be more worried about the minds of sadists than the consent of submissives?

Popularity: 29% [?]

I love Paris but have never explored its fetish scene. After seeing ‘Paris by Night: Nuit Demonia‘ I want to.

The six minute documentary features a couple of notable Euro kink stars, a bit of Shibari, some spanking and a statuesque blonde with wings pulling her lawyer/judge/dad around by the throat as he gazes at her pleading for a kicking. Unlike most docukink, it comes across as neither salacious or condescending.
Unfortunately, the universal law of the fetish world (dominant women hot, submissive women… not so much) seems to hold true even in France. Why don’t more confident, beautiful, well worked-out Phd’s want to spend their evening at the end of a rope serving me drinks?

It’s not safe for work but not explict either (you crazy Yanks), and far more intellectually stimulating than the ancient spitroast scenes being posted on blogs everywhere else (yeah, you know who I’m talking about.)

Get yourself edjumacated, ignorants.

Popularity: 34% [?]

The Register has an interesting piece on a woman’s discovery of her sadomasochistic self in Second Life.

I’ll admit to being a second life virgin, I have enough trouble managing my first one. Putting in the effort to get laid in a virtual environment seems like a waste when I could apply the same skills in public and end the night feeling someone’s earrings tap my thighs.

Given The Register’s usual focus, sample headline ‘FTC green lights BrocData’, this is pretty fruity.

She was fisting me hard, and I thought, this has got to be as painful as childbirth! The pain I imagined danced through me, making me tremble violently, electrifying me, tingling every nerve – a bright, jagged pain that I adored. It was her pain! I loved it with my very heart. I begged her to f*ck me harder still! And then she sneered at me, shouting, “Feel this hand that f*cks and owns your p*ssy! Stronger and harder than any man-c*ck you ever had in your pathetic bi fantasies!”

How late to the party am I? Is Second Life a big part of anyone’s sex-life yet and if so, what’s the appeal?

Popularity: 67% [?]

Bondage and sex in American porn don’t mix. Juries are traditionally wary of BDSM because restraint makes consent hard to gauge but producers are pushing the boundaries, and scenes of sex and bondage which have until recently been limited to the web (where everyone’s stupid/ignorant/offshore) are now making it onto DVD.

Jenna Haze, in handcuffs, at the yogurt pump

You can clearly consent to sex and bondage but is it dangerous? I feel a test-case coming…

Popularity: 75% [?]

The fun of bondage is the control and submission which I love, but all the dungeons and dragons geekery frankly makes me limp. Who wants to buy a drawer full of metalware when you have a willing partner and a decent imagination?

Enter Salvor Studios. Their chain-link illustrated paper tape is cheap, smart and to my mind sexier than ropes and chains. Isn’t it sexier having someone choose not to break their bonds – under threat of more sexy punishment – while you push them closer to the edge? (Yeah ladies, that’s how I rock it – it’s probably fresh panty time.)

I’ll stop before I go all ‘Penthouse Letters’ but you get the idea. This is hot, kinky, cheap and sexy without being ‘fucked-in-the-head’ as so much fetish stuff appears to be. Any volunteers for a review?

(found via CoolHunting)

Popularity: 33% [?]

Today the massive electronic brain to which I write this digital diary proclaimed that GooTube has de-listed thirty thousand files which breach copyrights in Japan.

Everyone saw this coming. YouTube is popular mainly because it’s the world’s Tivo. Anything worth watching makes it to YouTube and we all get to see what we need to.

Technically, most of what YouTube’s famous for is illegal, since the DCMA became law in America the original idea of copyright has been subsumed by corporate lawyers wildest fantasies about royalties. Now Google’s in charge people know there’s a company worth suing in control and the copyright abuse has to stop – or appear to – before the legal system catches up. Google are moving as fast as they can to clean their system.

(Of course YouTube without material under copyright is just kids and hippies uploading clips and far less interesting than it is as a global broadcast media repository.)

The porn world should be watching.

When Paul Cambria analyzed the stuff American juries lock people up for, mixing BDSM and sex was high on the list. The problem was making consent clear. How can someone object to something if they’re prevented from making themselves heard as part of the ‘game’. Safe-words might work at home but tied to a machine called ‘The Back Beaker’ with a ball-gag in your mouth, a hood on and an electric probe in your ass how exactly are you supposed to say slow-down?

Pornsters have conveniently forgotten this. They think the point is to show sex games which look abusive are consented to beforehand – the idea of a change of consent during sex has evaporated.

So they’ve started taking risks. Mixing sex and BDSM and posting a ‘Happy Shot’ at the end of every set (because if it’s shown last it must have happened last). The Happy Shot is apparently a picture of post-coital relief, happiness and bonding. It’s supposed to convince us, and potential jurors, no abuse of consent occured.

Is it? On sites which state:

“At one point she completely bites through a ball gag from being caned on her nipples.”

I can’t be sure.

Given a relieved, well paid performer who then points out she got a lot more than she consented to and brings a rape charge will a ‘Happy Shot’ do? The industry seems set to find out.

Popularity: 54% [?]

“Cup your hand slightly and aim for the upper inner edge of the butt cheek right above where it meets the thigh for a clean thwack” – Dominatrix, Manchester UK.

Popularity: 58% [?]

The comments following recent posts I’ve made about violence and porn have revealed that a number of people fear any attempt to legally separate the treatment of sex and violence, with regards to obscenity, is an attack on their right to consent to violent sex as sadomasochists.

The fear is that if we question the ability of sadomasochists to consent, the legality of sadomasochism comes under question (as it has in the UK) and sadomasochistic porn becomes an illegal record of criminal activity.

Sadomasochists rely on being able to consent to things that would otherwise be considered assault. American porn traditionally deals with this by separating scenes of bondage and sex, the thinking being that a court might argue there was no easy way for a bound performer to withdraw consent (recently this has been changing, Nina Hartley has shot bondage and sex together last year. The Feds appear to have decided to let it slide for now, perhaps they’re fans.)

Which leads to a question:

Should anything that’s consented to be legal?

The standard pornographers response is yes – but if we accept that some people, e.g. the clinically depressed or sufferers of other mental illness, make decisions with consequences they don’t understand, isn’t the key to consent how well informed it is? If so, in cases where uninformed consent is knowingly exploited, should society treat the consenting party as ‘under duress’ and only in that light decide if any criminal activity has occurred?

(NB: I get to play devil’s advocate here sometimes – anyone who misses that and decides to compare me to MacKinnion, Dworkin, Hitler or Willy Wonka for daring to challenge lib-alt-porn convention will find ‘I am a facist douchebag’ edited into all their comments.)

Popularity: 40% [?]

My friend John makes paddles out of re-purposed tire-tread. It’s as weird, clever and kinky as it sounds and, if you haven’t clicked through to him from the bloggasm you can read all about it here.

He’s in with a real chance to win a competition being held by Treehugger (which isn’t a tree porn blog, but is read by people who might buy it if you ever decided to make some.) I think the idea that a manufacturer of BDSM equipment (stuff categorized as un-PC abuse tools by some), might win Treehugger’s oh-so-PC prize is pretty hilarious. If you feel the same, vote for spanked asses here.

Popularity: 46% [?]