BBC News has an article on the first above-ground BDSM group in India, the Kinky Kollective.
The participants are members of the The Kinky Collective, a small group of heterosexual and transgender people, trying to connect to other Indians active and open about their BDSM preferences on various online communities and social networking websites.
The group’s two functions are education for people interested in kink, and spreading awareness to outside groups and agencies.
Ana is shocked when she discovers that Christian deliberately left hickeys all over her breasts, in order to discourage her from showing her breasts to anyone other than him.
I gape at my reflection. My wrists have a red welt around them from the handcuffs. No doubt they’ll bruise. I examine my ankles—more welts. Holy hell, I look like I’ve been in some sort of accident.
That’s what can happen when you wear handcuffs while doing something strenuous. (I suspect this is a nod to a scene in Twilight when, after consummating her relationship with Edward, Bela awakens covered in bruises.)
Photo courtesy of Penny
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Thoughts & Advice on Sex & Relationships
Ask Aunty Dee: Anal Play and Buttplugs
Being sexy
I’m Monogamish, Apparently
Orgasms, Spontaneous
Profoundly in love
Rape Fantasies
Why Don’t You Go Fuck Yourself?
Kink & Fetish
An Unexpected Gift
Cathartic Sex
Confession: The Stalking of a Doll
He got off to my laugh
Kink Guide to Fifty Shades Darker: conclusion
Kinky erotica from the top’s point of view
Pain and Collars
Pegging Prep for Virgin Territory
The Cowboy (1 of 4)
Sex News, Interviews, Politics & Humor
Erotic Writing
Desperation
Dream Lover
Everything You Give
From the Inside
Get Back in Line
Just Hands
Lust in the Dunes – Part VII: The Love Elite
nching on “Special K”
On The Phone
Out of the Blue
Tease
Take Two
The Stranger
White Stockings, White Stockings She Wore
What if?
Writing Challenge – A Question
I’ve divided the commentary on this chapter into two because I want to dissect the scene between Ana and Christian carefully.
Christian has asked Ana for her safeword.
I have a half-baked theory that the E.L. James we see in interviews is actually a J.T. Leroy-like front for the real author of Master of the Universe/Fifty Shades: a 15-year-old girl with serious mood and identity disorders. That’s the only way I can explain these books.
They say the only way out of hell is through, and here we go into the last third of the Fifty Shades trilogy.
If Fifty Shades of Grey roughly parallels Richardson’s Pamela, Darker is also a rough parallel of Richardson’s Clarissa. Ana is drawn into a reality completely controlled by Christian, just as Lovelace completely controls Clarissa’s environment. Unlike Clarissa, Ana eagerly accepts her man’s marriage proposal, despite that nothing has really been resolved in their relationship.
Davis, Robert C. Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800. Palgrave MacMillan, 2003 Amazon
What you might call “Mediterranean slavery”, of Christian Europeans captured through piracy or raids and enslaved in North Africa or the Near East, coexisted with Atlantic slavery, roughly paralleling the dates. While the numbers about Atlantic slavery are pretty solid, the numbers on Mediterranean slavery are far less so, and Davis is forced to piece together rough estimates from a variety of different sources.
Trying to pin down numbers of Barbary slavery is beyond the scope of this blog, and I don’t want to get into any kind of “oppression Olympics” about different slave economies. (Discussions of white slavery tend to bring out people with an axe to grind. One discussion of Barbary coast slavery on Fetlife included a post with a link to a white pride site. This included lengthy incoherent rants about the place of white people in history. One passage included an array of pictures of tribal people with facial tattoos or body modifications, followed by another array of white people with facial tattoos or piercings. The caption said that these white people took no pride in their heritage and were trying to imitate other races.)
Ley, David J. The Myth of Sex Addiction. Rowan and Littlefield, 2012 Amazon
Sex scandals are so prevalent that the publishers of The Myth of Sex Addiction by David J. Ley could reasonably expect that one would be in the news when the book launched. David Petraeus, former commander of US forces in Afghanistan and former director of the CIA, stepped up and performed adequately, but there were plenty of others waiting in the wings. His affair with his biographer was revealed when his mistress sent harassing emails to a female friend of the family, leading to an FBI investigation and ultimately his resignation. Predictably, people have applied the sex addiction label to the Petraeus affair.
Sex addiction has become our all-purpose rubric for sexual deviance, whether qualitative or quantitative, harmless or horrifying. Infidelity, porn use, homosexuality, masturbation, rape, fetishes, pedophilia, are all seem as symptoms of sex addiction. For a condition that is not recognized by many major medical and psychiatric organizations, sex addiction has amazing cultural currency, whether one views it as a moral failing or an illness.
Delve into the histories of those slapped with the sex addiction label, says Ley, and we will find a host of other problems: low impulse control, mood disorders, poor socialization, relationships between people with incompatible desires, etc. You find a guy crippled with guilt and shame because he masturbates twice a month. Examined closely, sex addiction dissolves into other conditions that are better known and more treatable.
On a strictly literary level, Darker is worse than its predecessor. EL James’ prose style hasn’t improved, and her plotting has gotten worse. Fifty Shades of Grey is built around a back-and-forth between Ana and Christian, while Darker is mostly just forth. Ana isn’t seriously resisting Christian anymore. A large part of this book is external challenges to their relationship, but they are handled in such a way to remove any tension or excitement.
A short video on the great gay male artist known as Tom of Finland, whose impact on all BDSM art, not just gay male art, is immense.
