Aug 192019
- Vice has a photo essay on the latex dominatrixes and fetishists of Russia.
- The deceased alleged child molester Jeffrey Epstein purchased multiple books on BDSM slavery via Amazon, including SlaveCraft: Roadmaps for Erotic Servitude by Guy Baldwin, SM 101: A Realistic Introduction by Jay Wiseman, and Training with Miss Abernathy: A Workbook for Erotic Slaves and Their Owners by Christina Abernathy. (Rolling Stone, The Cut) Once again, we kinksters have to explain that just because abusers claim some link to consensual BDSM, it doesn’t indict BDSM as a whole.
- A female dominant describes how she sees herself reflected in porn and mainstream media, and it’s not flattering. “What I gleaned from this and pornography is that femdomming was a very specific thing based on coercion, humiliation, and exploitation.” Medium
- Slate has an article on the Chinese bondage community, and its struggles in a deeply conservative and heavily surveilled state. “BDSM and bondage are not illegal per se, but China’s laws are vague, and wording like ‘public promiscuity’ in Section 301 of the criminal code can be interpreted in many ways.”
- Andrea Zanin, aka SexGeek, wrote an essay on a kind of internalized respectability politics among kinksters, with scene players being suspicious towards lifestylers. “…over the decades of kink’s further mainstreaming, what’s happened is that kink hobbyists have drastically multiplied, and perhaps because of those numbers, many of them now see themselves as safer, saner and more consensual than full-timers because of what they perceive as built-in healthy limits on what they do.”
- Cools magazine has an interview with model Kimberly Mae that covers how latex fetishism has moved from Fetlife to Instagram. “Around five years ago an online migration in the fetish community began. Due to data breaches and other reasons, many visual fetishists (think rubber, leather, shibari, etc.) moved away from the Fetlife platform and on to Instagram. I think because we have so much more visibility on Instagram, particularly the latex style is becoming more and more mainstream.”
