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The Sex Blog Of Record
ErosBlog posts containing "spanking"
December 2nd, 2016 -- by Bacchus
I am in the research phase of setting up a Patreon page for ErosBlog, with an eye toward keeping the lights on and building the chance to do more of what I do best. “Research phase” in this context means studying how people I respect are doing it; and thus have I have been reading a lot of compelling Patreon pitches, and coming to the conclusion that we all need to be doing more to highlight patronage-supported projects of our friends, peers, mentors, heroes, and creative people we could not live without. Hence this post, which I hope will be the first of a lengthy if occasional series.
Today I want to highlight the Patreon pages of three women who have been doing excellent work in the adult/erotic space for at least as long as I’ve been blogging. But first, perhaps just a few words about the growing importance of the peer-patronage economic model?
As I see it, we live in a world where the old economic orders are breaking down. Automation, globalization, and information technology have utterly disrupted the reliable wage-and-salary economies upon which most of us depended, while the internet has killed the traditional publishing models that used to keep artists and creatives (a few of them, anyway) in day-old bread and thinning shoe leather. Late-stage capitalism seems increasingly predatory and self-referential; it pays only for what it values, its values are increasingly estranged from the culture that supports it, and precious little sustenance trickles down from the well-caulked boats being buoyed up on its rising tide. The creativity that brings us joy is no longer likely to be well-supported in the market, and relying on the patronage of the wealthy (although a time-honored survival strategy of artists everywhere) has its limits in the tastes of the wealthy. If this were not true, why would #pornocalypse — which at heart is about the squeamish unwillingness of the investing class to have its money associated with sexual culture — even be a thing?
One approach to a solution is crowdfunding. A duke or a titan of industry can support an entire opera company, but the company (predictably enough) will perform mostly the operas the duke enjoys. The internet lets us democratize this patronage model; I’m no duke, but I can (at least in a good month) afford a dollar here or a fiver over there to support something that delights me. The same internet that destroyed the traditional publishing model now lets an artist who draws anally-obsessed anthropomorphic ponies find support in a hundred or a thousand places. No more insufficiently-perverted dukes gate-keeping our pornography!
But finding each other is still a challenge in this newly-democratized peer-patronage model. The internet makes such finding possible, but does not make it easy. So that’s my inspiration for this post: to try and help with that. Here are three tireless women who deserve all the support they can get, and whose creative energy will more than repay us for whatever support we can provide. I’ve “known” all of them for more than a decade without ever meeting any of them, but what I “know” may not always be the face that they choose to present to the world today, so for purposes of this series, I’m just going to amplify their own words as found on their own crowdfunding pages:
Violet Blue at Patreon
I’ve created and run the oldest sex culture blog on the internet (tinynibbles.com). I’ve authored dozens of indie books in a turbulent and censorious market. And I regularly make news by reporting on hacking and privacy, companies behaving badly, and injustices to at-risk populations. I’ve bootstrapped my site and everything that goes with it, I work at industry rates (which aren’t great), I constantly have to chase down people who take months to pay invoices for my writing, and I was homeless as a kid, so I only have me. I want to do so much more.
I want to grow all of this.
If you’ve ever followed me or my work, you’ve seen how hard I fight for people who need a voice in their own conversations — and you’ve seen how badly I get attacked, censored (Libya, Apple, Focus on the Family, Amazon search, Facebook, the list goes on). You’ve also seen my work cause positive change, like drawing attention to PayPal’s financial discrimination against sex workers, getting Tumblr’s NSFW search reinstated properly. And maybe some of my work has touched your life, too.
…
I’m freelance and indie. This means I’m not beholden to interests or advertisers, and no one will ever control what I say. But there are many business tools I cannot use, because the topic of half of what I cover is sex — plus, like many, I’m affected by things like Amazon deciding to deep-six searches for indie books about sex.
Alison Tyler at Patreon
My name is Alison Tyler, and I’m an insomniac. Since I don’t value sleep, I write. All the time. If you see me at a 24-hour diner, I’ll be writing. If I’m stopped in traffic, I’m scribbling with a ballpoint on the back of my hand. That light on in the window at 3 a.m.? That’s me. Hope I didn’t disturb you.
To date, my career has been a whirlwind–a drive in a fast car, on a mountain road with winding hills. Was it being in the right place at the right time, sheer luck, or a refusal to give up? No clue. But I’ve managed to work for Masquerade, Black Lace, Plume, Harlequin, Penthouse, and others.
There’s no safety net here. I’m in my glitter and rhinestones. Let’s run off together and make our own circus.
Pandora Blake at Patreon
I’m Pandora Blake, the award-winning feminist porn producer and performer. I’ve been making kinky films since 2011, when I launched Dreams of Spanking, my website dedicated to ethically-produced BDSM erotica. The site is radical in prioritising gender diversity, explicit behind the scenes enthusiastic consent, and equal pay for equal work.
My erotic films express my own kinky fantasies and are sex-positive, body-positive, and strongly rooted in queer politics. I’m proud to say that my work has won multiple international awards, as well as attracting a wonderful fan base – until the UK porn censor ATVOD stepped in and shut my site down in August 2015 under new anti-porn legislation. After a drawn-out campaign, I’m delighted to have successfully won an appeal against the ruling, and the site is now back online, officially exempt from the new legislation.
Since fighting that battle I’ve had to learn a lot about porn law – and I’ve been increasingly called upon to speak publicly on issues of sex work law reform, censorship and obscenity law, sexual freedom, kink acceptance and ethical porn. I was honoured to be awarded Publicist of the Year at the Sexual Freedom Awards 2015 for my efforts advocating for sex workers’ rights and against porn censorship. Now, I’m taking that work to the next level.
Image Credit (directly above): Movie patrons in an advertisement for the National Cash Register Company’s new ticket-printing register, from the Motion Picture Studio Directory and Trade Annual 1916.
Image Credit (top of post): An opera company seeks royal patronage for French opera by throwing vulgar English theatre under a train, from an 1841 issue of Punch.
November 23rd, 2016 -- by Bacchus
From Spanking Blog, here’s a vision of what it looks like when your internet dating isn’t going so well:
The funny thing is, if history is my guide, I’ll get at least one intrepid person posting in the comments to the effect of “Riding crop and a hard dick? I can work with that, I’ve dated worse, hell, at this point I think I’d give the guy a tryout!”
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November 21st, 2016 -- by Bacchus
I’m just not into knife play. Searching tells me there are only a few references to it in all the years (fourteen now!) of ErosBlog archives, and one of those few is cautionary.
Not only don’t I like knife play because the frisson of blood and potential death the knife symbolizes and eroticizes for many people just leaves me cold, I also do not like it because there’s a sort of side-pool of knife enthusiasts for whom the knife is a symbol of their enthusiastic disregard of consent. These are the people who, at least in my imagination, can utter the phrase “cut a bitch” without irony, and whose Tumblrs seem to get deleted every few weeks for seriously over-the-top violent expressions of misogyny. I don’t want to encourage those people, nor to be mistaken for one of them.
Nope, I’m just not that into knife play.
However…
It turns out that there’s a tiny chink in my erotic armor where blades are concerned. The chink (microfetish?) involves using knives as sexual tools. Probably the most well-known example I can think of are those two scenes with the Captain’s dagger hilt, from Beauty’s Punishment by Anne Rice:
He held something dazzling and beautiful in the light before her, and she blinked to see it. It was the handle of his dagger, thick, encrusted with gold and emeralds and rubies.
It disappeared and quite suddenly she felt the cold metal against her wet vagina. “Ooooooh, yes…” she moaned and felt the handle slide in, a thousand times harder and crueler than the largest organ, it seemed, as it lifted her, crushing against her smoldering clitoris.
She almost screamed with desire, her head falling back, her eyes blind except for the Captain’s eyes looking down at her. Her hips undulated wildly against his lap, the dagger handle going back and forth, back and forth, until she could not endure it and the ecstasy came again paralyzing her and silencing her open mouth, the vision of the Captain vanishing in a moment of total deliverance.
And:
But something touched her pulsing clitoris, scraped it through the thick film of wetness. It plunged through her starved pubic lips. It was the rough, jeweled handle of the dagger again … surely it was … and it impaled her.
She came in a riot of soft muffled cries, pumping her hips up and up, all sight and sound and scent of the Inn dissolved in her frenzy. The dagger handle held her, the hilt pounding her pubis, not letting the orgasm stop, forcing cry after cry out of her.
Even as she was laid down on her back on the table, it tormented her, making her squirm and twist her hips. In a blur she saw the Captain’s face above her. And she writhed like a cat as the dagger handle rocked her up and down, her hips spanking the table.
A pedant might argue “That’s not really using the blade as a sexual tool; the dagger hilt’s just a fancy dildo with a knife on the other end.” Yeah, dude, whatever, you get back to me with that argument after it’s been up your hole. But sure, I get what you’re saying.
You want a better example? I have a better example. This is from the “Heavy Metal” shoot (November 4, 2016) at Infernal Restraints, starring Raquel Roper:
At least in my imagination, there’s nothing menacing about this knife. He’s not threatening to stab her, she’s not at risk of losing any body parts, there will not be blood tonight. However, he is about to use the knife to cut off her panties, which he has judged to be in excess of her immediate clothing needs. It’s a completely utilitarian act. Fuckin’ panties got to go. But she’s wiggling, the knife is sharp, tender bits are tender, we don’t want any accidents, we have big plans for those tender bits. All observers agree: the lady wants to be holding still for a moment. And so she feels right now the tiniest prick at her tender skin with the tip of the knife, a little touch that she can’t ignore, one that says “hold your horses, girl, calm down, you want to stop moving at this time, a sharp knife is on the field and in motion.” It’s a twofer; it’s knife-as-panty-remover and knife-as-safety-signal.
Other people may see it differently. But that’s how this picture grabbed me.
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November 19th, 2016 -- by Bacchus
Not that we don’t have our own problems looming here in the United States when it comes to worrying about official hostility to online pornography, but this blog post by Pandora Blake explains in the bleakest imaginable terms how all but the most uncontroversial and bland corporate porn is in the process of being legislated off the internet in the United Kingdom. Pandora recently fought a protracted and successful legal battle for the right to sell her progressive and ethical spanking porn online in the UK, but her site was offline during that battle and so her victory was necessarily something of a Pyrrhic one. And now her site is once again under threat (along with pretty much every other porn site in the UK from the sound of things) from a proposed new law that imposes economically-ridiculous age verification requirements on porn websites while simultaneously just flatly banning from the internet a great deal of kinkier porn:
The Digital Economy Bill is currently going through Parliament, and has just come to the end of its committee stage. The section of the Bill introducing compulsory age verification for all adult sites accessible from the UK will have a serious impact on Dreams of Spanking, and on many other adult websites.
Complying with this legislation will be difficult, if not impossible. First of all, I’ll have to overhaul the whole site structure of Dreams of Spanking. Any content that would be classified as “18” or higher will be illegal to publish publicly, on the open internet. So video, images and audio that contain any nudity, bums or spanking will need to go behind intrusive, privacy-violating age checks.
To prove you’re over 18, you’ll have to type in sensitive personal details such as your legal name, credit card details, date of birth, address or phone number. That data will be visible not to me, but to whatever age verification system I install – private companies that are free to operate unregulated, and without having to safeguard the security and privacy of your personal data.
Not only is this terrible for you, it’s terrible for me. Every age check will cost me money – estimates range from £0.05 to £1.50 per check. Dreams of Spanking currently receives over two thousand visitors a day (under half the traffic we had before ATVOD forced us offline), so the cost of checking the age of every site visitor would add up to significantly more than the site’s total revenue – and that’s before we take into account existing costs such as production, paying my team members, and bandwidth. In other words, complying with the age verification law will immediately put the site out of business.
Even if I can somehow persuade enough of those two thousand visitors to buy memberships that I can afford to verify all their ages, the site will never be the same. This law will mean no more public previews. No free trailers, no preview images, no free hosted galleries, no birthday spanking giveaways, no Creative Commons projects and no charity caning films. No more getting around CCBill’s content restrictions by giving material away.
No more transparency, and no more free porn.
As bad as that sounds, we haven’t even gotten to the worst part. The new UK law proposes to outright prohibit whole swathes of BDSM and fetish porn:
Even if I somehow manage to fully comply with the legislation: hide everything spanking-themed on the site behind age checks; find the money to check the ID of every non-paying visitor who wants to browse my free previews; survive the loss of traffic and Googleability – even if I can stomach the disappearing of this blog, the behind the scenes videos, the performer interviews, and the discourse about ethics and consent – the site still can’t survive, because every scene that was criminalised by the AVMS regulations will be recriminalised by the Digital Economy Bill.
ATVOD found us in breach because they ruled that some of our videos depict corporal punishment that leaves ‘lasting’ marks. We won our appeal on the basis that the principle purpose of the site is not commercial, and it is not in competition with mainstream broadcast media. That victory won us an exemption to the AVMS Regulations 2014. But the AVMS didn’t invent the rules around what content is banned; it drew them from existing classification guidelines used by the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) for films and TV.
The guidelines prohibit any depiction of pain play that leaves marks on the body beyond those deemed “transient and trifling” from classification even as R18, the highest classification category in the UK. Basically, under the current rules you can’t show any act which would constitute assault or actual bodily harm, or any act which would risk injury to the viewer if it were imitated. So no caning, no belting, no welts, no bruises – and that’s before we get into the bans on things like facesitting, breath play, fisting, squirting, watersports and “full” bondage, defined as the restraint of all four limbs plus a gag.
The AVMS regulations were the first instrument of UK law to apply those classification guidelines to material published on the internet. We’ve enjoyed a heady few months of official exemption from them: but now the Digital Economy Bill uses those same guidelines to control what can and can’t be published online. If the Bill is passed it will be illegal to publish any ‘prohibited content’ even behind age checks. Let that sink in: even age-verified, consenting adults who have handed over their real names and addresses to prove their age won’t be allowed to look at spanking videos that show marks.
Pandora is an award-winning community-supported activist as well as a pornographer, and she isn’t giving up. No law is a sure thing before it’s final; things might go differently and better in the UK than Pandora and her lawyers currently expect. We may certainly hope so, but my point, in any case, is a larger one: the relative freedom pornographers have enjoyed to publish internet porn in the 21st century is more fragile than you probably imagined. When British porn goes dark and Great Britain vanishes from the kinky internet, we in the rest of the world may barely notice; it’s not like we don’t have our own fetish porn resources. The lesson, though, is clear. Laws and policies change, not always for the better. If we value the work of independent pornographers here in the United States (as I, for one, do), we’ve got to have their backs.
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November 11th, 2016 -- by Bacchus
Spanking Blog found this cute spanking artwork in a graphic novel by Bruno Coq:
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October 27th, 2016 -- by Bacchus
I used to have a bit of a side hustle on Fiverr where I would research your mysterious porn and tell you its provenance. Fiverr turned out to be too large a pain in the ass to deal with in the long run, and five bucks turned out to be too little to charge; but I still do porn research commissions for discerning patrons when I can get them. Porn attribution is something I am good at and really enjoy doing, but sadly there’s very little market for it.
Last night, I was at my keyboard doing a research commission for Dr. Faustus when by happenstance (which is to say, I was procrastinating instead of working) I saw a hilarious animation posted to Twitter by an old web-friend:
And then:
Well, I was curious, too, and what’s more, this felt like an opportunity to show off. So, I did. To the research-mobile, Bacchus!
For a paying client, I would have also tried to find out some more information and include a capsule summary of the Iyashite Agerun Saiyuuki anime, about which I in fact know utterly nothing. But this was a freebie; I figured the provenance and a watchable link was enough.
But then came the flatteringly-phrased follow-up question:
Flattery will get you (or, well, Adele anyways) almost anywhere with me, but it won’t force the requested information into 140 characters. Hence, this blog post.
So, how did I do it? Here’s the step-by-step I used. A different porn sample might require different tools and methods, but this is what worked this time.
Step One: Undestroy the .gif that Twitter destroyed.
A .gif on Twitter isn’t actually a .gif; Twitter encodes all uploaded .gifs into .mp4 movie files. Which is fine for the Twitter user experience but is a pain in the ass for searching. Reverse image search tools we have. Reverse movie search tools? Not so much. There are fancy ways to extract searchable frames from an .mp4 movie file, but I took a good-enough brute force approach and snapped a screenshot of the animation while it was playing:
Step Two: Choose a reverse image search tool.
There are a variety of reverse image search choices, and in a paid research task I might use all the ones I know about. But this time, I went right to the one that usually serves me best for porn searches. That happens to be the image search tool at the Russian search site Yandex. This tool works like Google used to work back before Google started to pretend it had never seen the vast majority of porn sites. Yandex is great, I love it for this.
Step Three: Do your reverse image search.
Once you’ve got some search results, start scrolling through them, looking for something in the snippets that looks like it might be an attribution clue. When I’m searching anime, I’m usually happy to see random Japanese words that look like a title:
Step Four: Use the clues you find to refine your search.
So I clicked that link highlighted above. And don’t you know it? That tumbler was dead; nothing there. But I took a second look at the broken Tumblr URL: http://howl-et.tumblr.com/post/28324944865/awkwardjapaneseporngifs-the-hentai-task. That’s a reblogged post from a tumblr called awkwardjapaneseporngifs; the fastest way I know to find the original post (if it still exists) is to Google “awkwardjapaneseporngifs-the-hentai-task”. One click on the first of those results, second click on the source link and tada! Success. We have our attribution:
Step Five: Confirm the attribution.
So now we know that somebody on the internet said this was “From Iyashite Agerun Saiyuuki, Ep. 1.” The final step is to Google that and see if the original item comes up. In this case, I wanted to find the complete episode, so I could watch it and see if the rest of it was as lunatic-wonderful as the .gif scene. (Answer: mostly not, but there are a few moments…) And so that led me to this link, where you can view the whole episode. Sure enough, our scene appears about 22 minutes in. Attribution confirmed!
And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you do that. Hope it helps!
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October 12th, 2016 -- by Bacchus
Spanking Blog brings us this vintage entry from the category of “as bad as things seem today, they used to be a lot worse”:
Apparently there was a time when a woman couldn’t even pray without a big creepy man menacing her from behind…
The artist is not known, but if I had to take a wild stab at guessing, I’d go with Thomas Rowlandson. (I am very much hoping this bad guess will stimulate someone to come along and set me right.)
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