Tiptoeing into 2022
A whole month into a new year… so how does 2022 look so far? In the short term, at least, further mass house arrest and further harm to the event and hospitality industries – and all your favourite fetish markets … Continued
Musings
Passwords, Safewords and Safety
Well, here I am in password hell again. Shouldn’t really complain, as it is lovely to have a Shiny New Laptop, but it is a touch tiresome to have to reset pretty much every password for every platform because, yes, … Continued
The joys of outdoor trading
Home from a merry afternoon’s bookselling in the New Forest, I started remembering how some of my earliest stallholding antics involved outdoor trading. At 21 or so, long before fetish markets (or, indeed, before working out that I might … Continued
Some things don’t last forever
There was a time when everyone thought that everything on the Internet was going to be there forever – rings around the world. And, to be fair, some stuff hangs around and some stuff unexpectedly pops up when you’d rather … Continued
Facebook and the latest moral panic
WAAA, Facebook, WAAA! Once again, we’ve got a social media-related moral panic going on, and once again, some people one might have expected to know better are falling for it. Ooh, waa, boohoo, social media is bad for our mental … Continued
Uniforms, power and consent
A lot of people have a thing about uniforms: there’s definitely a uniform fetish.* This may well be because uniforms are fundamentally about power – they either confer it or strip it from you, which makes them erotic to many. … Continued
Can you really change their minds?
How do we get people to change their minds? Of course, most will change their behaviour in the face of threats and coercion, bullying and ostracism, but it’s not a good idea to regard that as job done. Whether or … Continued
Regularity and capacity and optimism
A while ago, I remember listening to some advice on blogging, which emphasised the importance of being regular. It’s not bad advice – a blog which only gets updated every six months or so is not a blog which will … Continued
Not so sexy sex scandals
Mate, couldn’t you have waited? Not so much for the ‘rules’ to change (because everyone knows that most of them are arbitrary nonsense rather than sensible public health guidance) but because if all the Matt Hancock Sex Scandal had only … Continued
Respectability, kink and consent
The ongoing squawkfest about whether kink should be ‘allowed’ at Pride events seems to be quite the bullshit cocktail. Some of it is likely to be concern trolling or simple mischief, as usual in the Time of Internets. Some of … Continued