Paris Hilton does bondage

A thoroughly enticing title but, alas, a misleading one: I’m afraid I don’t have any snaps of a hogtied Miss Hilton to share with you. But in my defence the title is taken directly from an article I spotted today on a celeb news site (feel free to put scare quotes round the words ‘article’ and ‘news’ in that sentence) that amounts to a plug for Paris’s forthcoming music album. (Which promises to be a treat, of course). The ultra-tenuous connection to bondage seems to be that Paris wore “S&M style” lingerie for a publicity photoshoot.

Which is fair enough: she can wear what she likes and promote herself how she likes. The thing I’m interested in is the idea of kink as a style, or a marketing gimmick. First and foremost it seems to me that, whether a celeb is actually a practicing kinkster or not, a surefire way of guaranteeing attention and column inches is to slip into a “racy” outfit and hint at a degree of kink.

It isn’t the first time Paris has done so, as this photo from 2008 illustrates:

The word “racy” was, of course, used in the articles covering that appearance, too. Which hints at the single most vital factor in the kink-style phenomenon: the media. In an era when mainstream audiences are less easily shocked than ever before – when they have, in a superficial sense at least, seen it all – the media machine still needs things to ‘shock’ people with. And it seems that kink (or watered-down, family-friendly kink-chic) fulfils that function right now.

Speaking personally, I’m not shocked or offended in the slightest by seeing someone famous in PVC. The thing that jumps out at me – the thing that gets closest to offending me – is the emptiness of the whole exercise; the studied cynicism of it. It feels like kink stripped of all its meaning; kink as nothing but a fashion statement. And it always does feel cynical; like a marketing ploy where none of the players have any investment beyond getting paid. The celeb pretends to be kinky, the media pretend to be breathlessly shocked (and faithfully copy and paste the relevant press release, with all the key buzzwords), the audience pay attention for two minutes then click onto another story.

And, while I would never claim ownership of all things kinky or seek to bar anyone from expressing themselves, I can’t help feeling somehow... cheapened by that.

Thoughts welcome!

Does your husband yawn at the table?

Or, isn’t it great when you stumble upon a new thing? There I was, diligently researching matters of serious seriosity and deep deepness when, oh! Like a girl finding a gingerbread house in the middle of the forest I came across a Tumblr blog called Weird Vintage. I only meant to peek round the door... maybe just stay for a little teeny while... but bang went my afternoon!

The site consists of an endless array of imagery that, if nothing else, proves that the world has always been mad. There’s kooky stuff like this:

And this:

And of course the occasional bit of this:

But I think the artefacts that tickle/flabbergast/disturb me the most are the vintage advertisements... some simply have to be seen to be believed. (“For PEP and VIGOR – Vitamin Donuts!”) And oh, the misogyny!

There are lots of ads like that. This thing looks like fun, though:

Exercise, my ear! “Oh! O-oh! It-- it’s all right, darling, d-don’t come in-- I’m invigorating m-my vital organs!” LOL. And I bet it gave the Countess of Aberdeen complete satisfaction, the naughty girl.

Warning: as I mentioned in opening, browsing this site can be highly addictive. I spent ages on it when I should have been doing the housework like a good little Fifties girl... whatever will my husband Better Half say when he comes home?

With any luck he’ll splash out on a Horse-Action Saddle and put me on it to sort out my hysteria. ;D I do hope they still sell them someplace! (I reckon riding one of those with a freshly-spanked posterior would be orgasmically highly stimulating, and of course highly effective as a punishment... “Oh! N-not the g-gallop setting! Oo-oh!”)

The scent of spanking

I dunno, you co-write one little blockbuster spanking book and everyone wants a piece of you. Endorse this, appear on that: if I had a PA she would have been run off her feet dealing with all the calls. Of course, I’ve played hard to get – I’m not the sort to put my name to just any old thing – but the offer from one particular fashion house was just too good to turn down. My own weight in jelly worms! Wheee! :D

So what fine product have I graced with my moniker?

Penny perfume! Check it out:

Cute bottle! (I wonder where they got the idea from?) And the smellies-spiel is pretty cute, too:

The fashion-forward, kink-conscious young woman of today needs a playful yet sensual scent. A scent that says “I'm a woman and I like to be spanked. What are you gonna do about it?” Red by Penelope Hasler and Spanky Couture is that scent. Fresh accords of tangerine, rosewood and water hyacinth complement the heat of freshly-swatted female skin and the tears on your blushing face to keep you smelling divine as you sob in the corner with your ass on fire.

Red. Like your heart. Like your butt.

Speaking from experience, wearing one’s own fashion-forward fragrance provides little comfort when you’re facing the wall in disgrace, holding your skirt up to show off your naughty, glowing bottom. If anything, it makes it all the more humiliating.

I thoroughly recommend it! ;D

Do any of you have ideas for other spanking-related product tie-ins? Aunty Andrea kitchen utensils, perhaps? Vitsky leather belts? Taste for Disgrace pasta sauce? :)

The wonders you can do

I rather skipped over the non-kinky gifts I received for Christmas in this post, but I want to write a little bit about one in particular that BH bought me: a DVD of series 1 of Wonder Woman. (Yes, the TV show from the 1970s). Utterly fantastic. I don’t know if there are enough superlatives to fully capture its awesomeness, in fact.

Colourful, camp, funky, it’s like a blast of concentrated Americana. Never a bad thing. And what a great character WW is! Like all great characters she can of course represent all kinds of things to different people but to me she represents, above all, an uncompromisingly positive expression of femininity. I mean that in all seriousness, in case you were wondering: it’s this that transcends the comic-book structure of the show and sets it light years above things that are superficially similar, like the 1960s Batman TV show.

As her name might suggest, Wonder Woman can do all kinds of superhero-type ‘wonders’, but I think that these are purely allegorical to her real strength: her self-belief. (Just as her battles with various villains are allegorical to the ordinary woman’s various negotiations with the world). She personifies a paradigm of female dynamism, confidence and self-determination; a worldview in which women need not think themselves dependent upon men, or in any way secondary to them. With or without the star-spangled hotpants she is a woman who doesn’t need a big, strong man to help her deal with her problems; she’s a woman who takes no baloney and kicks righteous ass when it needs to be kicked, all without sacrificing one iota of her feminine essence. YEAH!

The significance of her being on the side of ‘right’ can’t be overstated, btw: traditionally, powerful women have been synonymous with evil and/or unnaturalness, as if a non-passive woman is an aberrance (think witches and the countless villainesses and wicked stepmothers of folklore and Western literature). Wonder Woman tears that particular rulebook up and shows that women can be strong and ‘good’. The show is easily as radical as anything Hélène Cixous and friends have written, and is IMO way more significant as it is right there in the centre of the American cultural mainstream.

The message of the show to me is that if one woman can liberate herself to think that way, then all women can, regardless of circumstances or context. I’m not ashamed to say that she’s a heroine of mine.

She also happens to have the coolest costume ever. I think I might have to put ‘Wonder Woman outfit’ at the top of my wish list for next Christmas. (Just wish I had a butt like Lynda Carter’s).

This post is nearly-but-not-quite a kinky think, btw, as it invites a think about feminism and kink, particularly on how one can reconcile (and justify to others) being an independent woman with being a submissive in a M/F (or F/F) relationship, but I’ll save that think for another time.

P.S. Does anyone else hear the WW theme music and want to rush off and fight crime that very instant?

P.P.S. I did dress up in my gym kit yesterday evening and was given a jolly good spankering over BH’s knee, skirt up, knickers down... and I did wail and promise to be a good girl in future and never ever to skip school again. I came so hard when BH fucked me afterwards that I thought I was going to explode. BLISS! (I’m sure any Martian readers will be very confused by this post).

Fun for all the family

Stuck for something to do with the folks this Xmas? Want your ease of sitting to be decided on the roll of a dice? Got a thing for guys in top hats?

Then you need to play Kinkopoly!

A game of chance and skill for people who like things a bit twisted, Kinkopoly lets you realise that long-cherished dream of spanking and being spanked whilst pushing natty little figurines round with your finger.

Move around the board, collect your favourite kinks, and give and receive jolly good hidings as you go: the winner is the one who begs for mercy last!

No two games are ever the same, especially given the vagaries of the Chance and Community Chest cards...

Oh dear!

Oh yes!

Aww!

Kinkopoly – the most fun you can have with (some of) your clothes on! Available from all good sex shops and Wal-Mart.

(The wonders of a paint program and a silly imagination...) ;D

N.B. Any similarity to a popular ‘property trading’ board game is entirely coincidental.

Dance Dance Spanko (lution)

A rich source of playful sexiness in mainstream culture – and one that not everyone may be aware of – is the dance music video. Their highly charged nature isn’t very surprising, all things considered, as dance is intimately associated with youthful energy, hedonism and, well, sex. ‘Music to get nasty to’, one could call it. Of course, that same accusation has been levelled at all kinds of popular music since forever, but the key difference with dance is its unapologetic, unfettered celebration of carnality and its use of the video as a deliberate extension of that.

Even so, the majority of dance videos (in common with most other aspects of pop culture, sadly) are rather uninspired. But every so often one is made with a touch of originality and wit, elevating it above the norm. And every (every) so often, one is made with a touch of kink! With that in mind, here are a few favourites of mine that you might also enjoy...

Plug It In

Original is definitely a word that could be used to describe the video to Plug It In by Basement Jaxx: it centres on a factory that builds sexy fembots, several of which are ‘plugged in’ after hours and played with by two lecherous security guards. Naughty guards! The fictitious TV ads for the fembots are my favourite bit, and really speak to my nascent robot fetishism. (More on that in a future post).

The Creeps

The Creeps (Camille Jones/Fedde Le Grand) has pleasing overtones of Secretary-like submission (sounds like I’m describing perfume), with office hotties crawling to their male boss in an attempt to please. No spanking, sadly, but there’s lots of barely-contained lust and very inappropriate thrusting on desks, and it’s the sort of video that makes me think “I’d really like to be in her shoes.”

Hear My Name

That same sentiment is emphatically true of the most overtly kinky video in my little selection, Hear My Name (Armand Van Helden). I’m sure many of you will have seen it already, but in case you haven’t it features two elegantly strict ladies of leisure delivering OTK spankings to an endless line of naughty men and women. Really great atmosphere!

Satisfaction

I want to give an honorary mention to two more videos that, whilst not kinky, are certainly hot (if you happen to like watching young ladies jiggling about) and really quite clever. Satisfaction (Benny Benassi) can be read as a satire on the conventions of advertising, a critique of the objectification of women, and even an ironic deconstruction of the dance video itself. But then on the other hand it may just be a sexy video full of girls using power tools. (In salacious, bouncing slow motion). Who can say?

Watch Out

Watch Out (Alex Gaudino ft Shena) is another reality-blurring, media-blending postmodernist babefest, with women in the role of soccer players in a video game played by the artists themselves. It’s all very ‘spanky sports’! Caution: contains extremely short shorts and plenty for the spanko imagination to run wild over.

I’m far from an expert on dance music, so the little list above simply comprises some of the videos that I happen to have watched and enjoyed. Feel free to add more in the comments! Oh, and the music in these videos may not be to everyone’s taste, so you might want to mute it. (I like it, but there you go).

Sleb spanking statement shock!

I don’t, as a general rule, look out for celebrity spanking-related stuff, but I couldn’t help spotting a plug on Yahoo! for Keira Knightley’s latest film, ‘A Dangerous Method’, and thought I’d mention it here for the benefit of any readers unaware of its release.

I mention it primarily because the film features the delectable Miss Knightley playing the lover (and patient!) of Carl Jung, and she is apparently spanked topless in a couple of scenes by the kinky shrink. I’m not a mind-reader but I figure some of you might think this worth investigating ;D

I also mention it because I was struck by the curious angle of the Yahoo! PR piece (and so, obviously, the angle taken by the film’s marketing people): it seems to consist of a reverse-psychology foregrounding of the film’s spanking content by means of loudly downplaying it, i.e. “Yes, okay, the film’s got spanking in it, but that’s not all that it’s about, and although we’re mentioning spanking here to the exclusion of everything else we don’t want you to focus solely upon it, honest we don’t.”

Methinks the artists doth protest too much...

A quote from Keira herself made me chuckle for similar reasons. Pseudo-complaining about the English media’s (apparent) uniquely keen focus on the kinky aspects of the film, she makes the astute observation that “We obviously like spanking, I don’t know.”

It’s hard to tell if she’s giving a sly nod to the ubiquitous yet still semi-underground culture of kink within our shores, or if she’s being genuinely naïve. If it’s the latter, I would simply like to add: well, du-uh! In other news, Keira, fire is hot, ducks can float and nobody on Earth is going to watch that movie for the insights into psychoanalysis it might provide :0)