If you have read previous articles on this site, you will probably have noticed that we emphasise the importance of consent — basic understanding of consent, different models of consent (e.g. SSC and RACK), the complications and legality of consent in BDSM settings, and more. Consent is the important red line that exists between BDSM…
Category: Concepts
5 Steps for Creating Healthy Kinky Relationships
It’s a bit of a “just for fun” day today (because Watts The Safeword is always fun), but there’s some solid wisdom in this great video about starting and continuing healthy kinky relationships: So, what were the 5 steps for creating a healthy kinky relationships from Amp and Mr Kristofer? Be Patient Be Open and…
Take a Moment
How’s life for you? I bet you’re busy. No… really. If life was a roulette wheel, I suspect it’d have 36 slots marked “busy” and one marked “totally nothing going on over here”. I think putting my money on you being busy is a fairly safe bet. I was thinking about my own back-log over…
Hey You, Get Off Of My Slide
I’ve been thinking lately about the idea of choices as a kind of pyramid that you move around. It’s a bit nascent, but I’ll try my best to explain. I MIGHT NOT HAVE RIPPLING ABS, BUT CHECK OUT MY DECISIONS We’ve all heard of the slippery slope, but how many of us consider the perils…
Blessed Are the Outlaws, the Rebels and the Kinksters
There must be a reason why people like to do something different once in awhile. We like to go for travel after a year of stressful work, and it feels refreshing. Each time we go for a trip, it feels like our mind and body regain some sense of clarity. For some of us who…
A (Very) Brief History of Modern BDSM Porn in the US
Porn is rich in history and all kinds of things for discussion, but today I just wanted to do a quick rollercoaster-ride through BDSM in America, where it’s come from and why it looks the way it does. BDSM images date back much further than modern history, in fact it can be traced back for…
Doms: How Controlling Do You Need to Be?
Power exchange in Dominance/submission is characterised by one person wanting to give up some degree of control, and another wanting to take that control on. On the surface it’s not a difficult concept, but like all things that involve degrees, there are infinite points of balance and it is only successful when both people feel…
The BDSM Community – If You Can’t See It or Touch It, Does It Exist?
We often use the term “BDSM community”, “kink community” or “lifestyle” for convenience, but the fact is that there is no BDSM community in the singular sense. We are a thousand separate tribes with different opinions, customs, ideals and beliefs. A united voice doesn’t exist, though we often pretend, for convenience, that it does. WHY…
Why Japanese Hentai Manga Still Upsets the West
Japanese “manga” has many subcategories. There’s a wide variety of mainstream manga, but it can also veer off to darker places. Loli and shota illustrate underage characters, guro and vore are extremely violent and can include snuff, and hentai quite often shows consensual and non-consensual BDSM. It’s not hard to find any of those varieties…
How Japanese Rope Bondage Culture Developed Outside of Western BDSM
Santa left a Taiwanese rope bondage book by 小林绳雾 under the Christmas tree for Master. Amongst the step-by-step illustrations, the author spends some time to understand the subtle difference between Western BDSM culture and Asia’s SM Culture. The book is in Chinese, but it’s a very interesting look at that topic, so I thought it…