New(ish) blogs I’m reading October 12, 2011

I’ve added quite a few blogs to my blogroll and most of them fall into the kink category. Specifically, and with one exception, they are blogs by either dominant women or submissive men. Some of these, like Maybe Maimed But Never Harmed and Male Submission Art (NSFW), are blogs I’ve been following for longer than I can remember.  The others are newer finds. After Bitchy closed up shop last year and I was seriously short on the time I’d need to find another blog like that, I pretty much stopped reading anything from a dominant woman’s point of view.

That kinda sucked, now that I think about it.

Recently though, I found Clarisse Thorn via her posts on Feministe and remembered again why I liked listening to smart women talking about their sexuality, their politics and their experiences. Her excellent post dismantling the idea of inherent female submission was what really hooked me on her writing. Not only was she clear and thorough, she also linked to a whole bunch of blogs by dominant women when debunking the idea that all women are naturally submissive. That particular blog post was something of a turning point for me personally, but I’ll talk about that later.

For now I want to talk about the blogs I found through her (thank you!) and totally fell in love with.

Like Domme Chronicles, by Ferns, for instance. I wanted by now to have a few favorite posts to point to, but honestly I think it’s just better to go to the beginning and just read the blog from beginning to end. I’m not quite caught up yet (I have to work, sadly), but it’s such a pleasure to read that I find myself not minding having to put it away because that means there’s more to come back to. And while the writing alone is worth going back for, I find that hers, of all the other, similar blogs I’ve read in the past, is the one that resonates most with me.

I’ve already talked about Topologies, one of the blogs Clarisse Thorn linked to directly in her post and the starting point for my return to the world of dominant women who blog. It’s gone a bit silent over there at the moment, unfortunately, but I really enjoyed their writing and hope they’ll be back soon.

Tales of a Domme, by Dishevelled Domina  is another smart, well written blog that I like reading. Her series interviewing submissive men has been interesting and she keeps doing things like that -asking questions about aspects of BDSM that interest her (and me!) and inviting people to have thoughtful discussions about how kink ties into other things, and so on. Her tumblr (NSFW) is pretty damn awesome too.

Then there’s Stabbity at Not Just Bitchy. The blog’s only been around since June this year, but I think it moved onto my favorites list pretty much immediately. Stabbity – and let’s pause for a second to admire that handle – talks sense. Not that the others don’t, mind you, but she does it in rant form and that just warms my heart. That she (and we) have shit to rant about isn’t so great, but at least it results in good reading and discussion.

Then there’s maymay’s blog Maybe Days. It consists of shorter posts, quotes, and photos and is, like most of maymay’s work, political. That’s a broad term, but it’s hard to find a succinct way of describing someone who’s done so much and put himself out there so often for the kink community and particularly for our side, i.e. submissive men and, by association, dominant women. I know that whenever there’s an update, it’ll be something worth reading and reacting to (and usually sharing).

So in all, this is a group of smart, thoughtful, passionate people who, very fortunately for the interwebs and the kinky people on it, happen to blog. I’m delighted to have found my way to them.

The Golden Retriever of Love May 3, 2011

If you haven’t come across her yet, know this: Captain Awkward rocks.

Her latest post, in which she tries to help a reader cope with her anxiety around a budding relationship, is both hilarious and actually very good advice. It cracked me up because I recognize myself in both the question and the answer, saw how silly it all was, and realized I was probably not going to get over the silliness any time soon.

Her two very practical suggestions are, well, very practical:

1. I  would resist, at this stage, getting all up in each other’s Social Media.  It’s too easy to obsess, and the more potential points of contact you have the more tempted you are to use all of them at once (or feel ignored via all of them at once).
2. Tell your loins to chill out.  People have lives and when they meet someone great it sometimes takes some rearranging to have enough time to really incorporate a new dating partner.  If you go a week or two without a date, that is normal and okay.  It means he is a person with a life and he had plans, and you want someone to have a life.  If you go two weeks without any contact at all, not even a quick text, THEN you are allowed to feel crazy, okay?

I’m guessing most people already know this on some level, but seeing it articulated can be helpful nonetheless.

Anyway, go read the whole post.

Greta on the Radio January 27, 2009

So I’m a fan of Greta Christina, as you might have gathered by now. Here she is in an internet radio interview on the Feast of Fools podcast titled Living Outside Religion. Not only did I enjoy the discussion, which ranges from talk of atheism within the queer community and atheism in general to how to interact with sex workers (hint: treat them like human beings) and Greta’s book on the topic, I really liked her voice. This is important for me because I seem to have finicky ears and people’s voices, particularly when recorded, can grate horribly even when I like their ideas and writing. There’s no way I’d be able to sit through some of my favorite podcasts if they were 55 minutes long. But the content of this interview was made all the more enjoyable because I could listen to it without fidgeting.