Impromptu bondage, planned demo!

Just had to repost this as Blogger lost it in a service outage, but never mind...

I may be a writer but it may entertain you to know I actually do the kind of stuff I write about. Sometimes in unexpected circumstances.

On Wednesday I went to one of the local munches. A ‘munch’, as you no doubt know, is a regular meeting that takes place in a public location where no-one dresses up (much) and there's no overt BDSM play. They're places where people new to BDSM, the area, etc. can feel welcomed. This particular munch uses the upstairs room of a pub, so is to that extent private.

I walked in and was immediately asked to do an impromptu bondage workshop. Someone who’d agreed to do one hadn’t turned up. I had no ropes with me but a few other people did. I borrowed them, did some basic stuff, got people to practice on each other and talked about safety issues as well.

The stuff I did wasn't highly technical - one useful knot and a style known as a 'karada' plus some of safety issues. But it was entertaining and hope other people found it so as well...

While I’m on the topic, Velvet and I will also be doing a suspension bondage demo at After Dusk next Thurs, 19 May in the UK midlands area. I'm not going to repost all the contact details here because they're already on my other joint blog with Velvet, DeliciouslyDeviant (see the post there on 'Writing bondage, doing bondage'). Or mail me. We haven’t done any demos for a while, so this weekend will have to involve some time to run through the stuff.

Well, now you know, if it wasn't obvious before, I don't just write about stuff.

In other news, there are some plans for erotic story readings and such. More to come when I’ve sorted details.

Have fun!

Impromptu demo!

Went to one of my local munches last night.

I'm assuming you know (a) a munch is a meeting of like-minded people, usually monthly, in a public space to discuss matters of mutual interest and they're a common feature of the kink world, and (b) as I've mentioned before there are currently five, and likely soon to be six or seven, BDSM munches local to me despite the paucity of actual BDSM events in the area.

This particular munch has the upstairs room of a pub, so is to that extent private.

I walked in and was immediately asked to do an impromptu bondage workshop! Apparently someone who'd agreed to do one hadn't turned up. I had no ropes with me - though some others did and I borrowed them, did some basic stuff and got people to practice on each other, talked about safety issues as well. It was fun, and the first time it's happened to me outside of a club.

While I'm on the topic, lest you think I write about stuff I don't practice, Velvet and I will be doing a suspension bondage demo at After Dusk next Thurs, 19 May - the link covers two connected events, After Dark and After Dusk, and if you have a Fetlife account you can see more details here. If not - Fetlife registration is quick and free.

Other stuff bubbling under - plans for erotic story readings and such... more to come when I've sorted details.

The local sex shop has closed

Actually this may be misleading, because what you think of as a sex shop and what I consider to be one could be rather different.

Yes, the two 'adult' shops in town selling clothing, DVDs and sex toys are still very much around. However, we used to have a local ropeworks. They made some of their own and bought in other stock, and you could get anything from garden twine to the rigging for a tall ship or foot-diameter hawsers. They also did a huge range of snaplocks, clips and other fastenings, canvases for trucks and marquees for events.

Since I tend to buy rope in industrial quantities, if only a couple of times a year, that was where I bought it. And not just for bondage, I might add (for that I mostly bought 7mm diameter polyprop braided, in different colours). For example I used them to source stuff to set-dress a stage for a goth band and similar things as well.

I rolled up there this afternoon and found the sign had gone. The factory next door told me they'd closed two months back. The recession had done for them.

It's a shame the recession is hitting the small businesses so hard. In future I'm evidently going to have to order online if I want stuff in quantity and at a good price - though I admit to having a yen for some rope laid from fibreoptic filaments I saw a while back from a specialist supplier... think how good that would look in a club...

SlutWalk in the news

It's a movement not just to relaim the word, but as Boston organiser Siobhan Connors says, "is in protest of a culture that we think is too permissive when it comes to rape and sexual assault. It's to bring awareness to the shame and degradation women still face for expressing their sexuality... essentially for behaving in a healthy and sexual way."

It came about as a result of a senior police officer in Toronto advising female students to "avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised." (Yes, he's since been disciplined).

I'll hold off on a long moral rant about how something like SlutWalk shouldn't even be necessary in today's society, because evidently it still is.

Links: BBC website report and SlutWalk Toronto Blog Page.

One other thing...

I forgot to mention I'm very pleased to see a friend of ours, Jon Wilson, has some of his pics being used on the covers of recent Renaissance Sizzler books - not my books, but never mind, and congratulations to him. You can see the images here and here. He's a very talented erotica/fetish photographer - and works over a broad range of other subjects as well.

He doesn't have a proper website at the moment but some of his images are accessible as lo-res pics via his Myspace page.

Thursday fun

Seems I don't have the capacity to blog here more than twice a week or so, because we've been going supporting various family members though their illnesses and issues, and working quite long hours (yes, the second bdsm novel is nearly done).

But we did find time to go to the Birmingham Bizarre Bazaar a couple of weeks ago and buy some new toys, and then get to After Dark on Thursday for the first time in about two years and use said kit. If you don't know where/what these places are and really feel a burning desire to know (or indeed if you have other burning desires I or we might be able to help with...?) you'll have to mail me.

After Dark was, as it always has been, a friendly and relaxed place in which we met up with some long-lost friends on the fetish scene. And played extensively with chains, ropes, various floggers, canes (no, you don't get to see pics of V's arse afterwards) and forced orgasm via a massager I bought well over a decade ago that sounds like it has a turbo-boost V8 engine and is of around that kind of power.

Anyway - it's the last push on getting the novel done, though other work is now also in the pipeline; always happens, you think you'll get a clear run at something and then the emails for stuff on short deadlines start arriving... As often happens I got 3/4 of the way through and then decided to add some earlier scenes and change others to conform to how I want the later stuff to pan out.

Oh - apart from that I wrote a short story that could well become a scene-setter for a novella, and didn't put it out on the DeliciouslyDeviant blog, and by way of compensation started a piece of flash fiction to post that ended up as 2400 words. Go to DeliciouslyDeviant to read it, though... It has, if indirectly, a pulp fiction/men's adventure mag kind of vibe about it - a subject I'm hoping to post more about at some time in the near(ish) future.

You probably already know this...

... but it's only grabbed my attention that that there's a whole Star Wars Slave Leia metal bikini thing going on. I only found out due to extended poking about looking at pulp fiction and SF for a project I want to start in the next few days.

We're talking about the outfit Princess Leia wears in Star Wars VI: Return of the Jedi, when she's been held captive by Jabba the Hutt and placed in his harem.

As Wikipedia describes it, the iconic slave girl costume comprises 'a copper brassiere fastened over the neck and behind the back with string,] copper plates at the groin in front and back, a red silk loincloth, and leather boots. There were other various adornments, including a hair fastener, a snake arm-wrap and two bracelets. Last, there was the chain and collar that bound her to Jabba which, ironically, she uses to strangle him.'

The outfit was apparently inspired by the work of fantasy/SF illustrator Frank Frazetta, much of it done in the 60s and 70s - the era of pulp, which is how I followed my nose to discover more. There are both official and unofficial websites devoted to his work.

While the Leia slave outfit, in terms of Frazetta's artwork at least, is actually rather conservative it became a cult sex symbol, 'burned into the sweaty subconscious of a generation of fanboys hitting puberty in the spring of 1983' as a Wired editor put it.

What intrigues me is that it seems also to have been burned into the consciousness of several generations of women. Some SF and Star Wars conventions have dozens, perhaps even hundreds, of women wearing this outfit. Don't believe me? there's a website devoted specifically to the costume, leiasmetalbikiniLcom. Alternatively, Google 'slave leia' and/or 'metal bikini' and look at the images section, or the G4 segment on Youtube of the Princess Leia Bikini Contest at ComicCon. And it's by no means the only convention that hosts such an event.

So... I can certainly understand the male perspective on this costume. And I can see that for a women who's confident about herself, it's a great outfit to wear that will show off your physical charms and assets, either in private or at a public event such as a SF convention where it's now accepted as normal female attire. You'd need to have a certain amount of courage to wear it, but at the same time it does make me wonder whether the Slave Leia thing is treated as irrelevant, or whether there's just a little bit of submissive fantasy going on in their heads...

Now this is the kind of action I could be interested in. I'm clearly going to have to turn myself into a morbidly obese sluglike crime lord...