Archive for September 29th, 2010

BDSM Exposed - Society’s Secret Subculture

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010

BDSM can be described as a subculture or alternative lifestyle choices for adults with particular leanings toward bondage, discipline, fetish, kink, and sado masochism culminating in consensual power play, pain and pleasure by its participants to enhance an erotic relationship. The term BDSM literally means: bondage and discipline, sadism and masochism.

The dynamics of a BDSM relationship are characterised by its participants adopting the consensual roles of slave or submissive, and surrendering themselves to the domination of a Mistress or Master for erotic gratification between both parties. It is important to emphasise however, that there is a widely recognised and respected code of behaviour for activities undertaken within the scope of BDSM and sado masochistic play which is “safe, sane and consensual” at all times during a scene. The basic principles of BDSM require that it be performed by responsible partners, of their own free will and in a safe way which means that everything is based on safe, sane and consensual behaviour of all parties. This mutual consent highlights a clear legal and ethical distinction between BDSM and crimes such as sexual assault or domestic violence.

BDSM encompasses a broad spectrum of activities such as bondage, discipline, slave training, spanking, CBT, nipple torture, electro torture, anal play, strapon, fisting, humiliation, spanking, corporal punishment, slapping, spitting, needle play, hot wax, forced feminisation, sissy slut training, water sports, foot worship, stiletto worship, boot worship, trampling, mummification, to name a few.

Traditionall, some of the tools of the performance are gags, whips, crops, paddles, ropes, cuffs, collars, straight jackets, straps and hoods, and indeed the Dominatrix or Master being the ultimate tool and driver of the kinky scenario.

Until the mid-nineties, the BDSM and fetish subcultures were still largely underground communities, however social acceptance swiftly escalated due to the prevalence of material available via the internet. It seems the internet has revolutionized our sex lives and provided us the luxury of exploring our darkest desires in the privacy of our own homes with downloadable BDSM, fetish and femdom movies at our fingertips.

These domination and femdom themed movies are likely to portray men and women experiencing various forms of bondage, discipline, punishment and torture and being consensually “forced” to endure submission, humiliation or sexual slavery by a femdom or master applying various methods of torture, punishment and discipline. Oh and yes, if you’re wondering, statistics show that a lot of people like it. Whether they are physically on the receiving end from their adored masochist or satisfying their individual fetish and kinks by watching BDSM, femdom and fetish movies, chances are there are a lot more people aroused by this secret world than they would openly admit.

The internet also paved the way for like-minded people to communicate not only locally, but world wide which in turn triggered an explosion of interest and knowledge of BDSM, kink, fetish and S & M. In addition, there has also been an explosive demand for traditional sex shops and online adult toy companies to stock fetish toys and fetish fashion, offering leather, latex, rubber and PVC.

Fortunately, the blossoming of websites offering BDSM movies has been a godsend for those curious, shy little creatures with no means of fulfilling their desire for slave training and servitude in the real world enabling them to explore their inner slave. Now they can download a session with an international BDSM Mistress and take all the punishment their little heart desires at a safe distance without those little telltale torture marks that tell their partner they have a penchant for a Femdom Mistress.

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What is Abstract Art?

Wednesday, September 29th, 2010

Abstract Art is a vast movement in American painting that showed up around the late 1940s and then become a predominant trend in Western painting through the fifties. The most prominent American Abstract Expressionist painters were Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, and Mark Rothko. Some others were Clyfford Still, Philip Guston, Helen Frankenthaler, Barnett Newman, Adolph Gottlieb, Robert Motherwell, Lee Krasner, Bradley Walker Tomlin, William Baziotes, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Pousette-Dart, Elaine de Kooning, and Jack Tworkov. The majority of them worked, lived, or had their work shown in New York City.

Though it is the common designation, Abstract Expressionism is not the most accurate name of the kind of artworks created by the aforementioned artists. In fact, the movement was made up of many different painterly styles that changed in both technical skill and quality of form. Despite this differentiation, Abstract Expressionist paintings share a number of wider characteristics. They are essentially abstract — that is, they consist of forms not taken from the outer world.

They furthermore push free, spontaneous, and individualised emotional expression, and they exhibit vast freedom of technique and application to attain this outcome, with importance centred on the exploitation of the variable physical form of paint to create expressive qualities (e.g., sensuousness, dynamism, violence, mystery, lyricism). They display the same emphasis on the unstudied and intuitive application of paint in a type of psychological improvisation like the automatism of the Surrealists, with the likewise intention of finding the force of the creative unconscious in art. They show the conscious ignorance of regularly structured composition built up in discrete and segregable effects and their replacement with a unique and unified, undifferentiated partition, network, or other image that exists in unstructured space. Lastly, the paintings fill huge canvases to allow those aforementioned visual elements both monumentality and engrossing might.

The earlier Abstract Expressionists had two particular forerunners: Arshile Gorky, who painted sensual biomorphic shapes using a free, delicately linear and liquid paint method; and Hans Hofmann, who used dynamic and harshly textured brushwork in his abstract but conventionally structured pieces. Another early and special influence on nascent Abstract Expressionism was the arrival on US shores in the late thirties and early 40s of a group of Surrealists and other important European avant-garde artists escaping the rise of the Nazis in Europe. These avant-garde artists quickly stimulated the native New York City painters and gave them a detailed understanding of the vanguard of European artwork. The Abstract Expressionist movement itself is generally viewed as having begun with the pieces mastered by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning throughout the late forties and early 50s.

With regard to the differentiation of style of the Abstract Expressionist movement, three wide approaches can be isolated. The first was action painting which is characterized by a loose, rapid, dynamic, or powerful handling of paint in sweeping or slashing brushstrokes, and in application largely dictated by chance, for example dripping or spilling paint openly onto the canvas. Pollock first practiced action painting by dripping commercial paints onto a raw canvas building up multilayered and tangled skeins of paint into thrilling and suggestive linear patterns. De Kooning utilised very vigorous and expressive brushstrokes creating richly coloured and textured images. Kline employed dynamic, sweeping black strokes on white canvas for building starkly monumental forms.

The second ground in Abstract Expressionism is displayed by a number of varied styles from the lyrical, delicate imagery and fluid shapes in paintings by Guston and Frankenthaler to the clearly structured, forceful, almost calligraphic artworks of Motherwell and Gottlieb.

The final and least emotionally expressive area was that of Rothko, Newman, and Reinhardt. These painters took large areas or blocks of flat colour and thin diaphanous paint to create quiet, subtle, almost meditative outcomes. The leading colour-field painter was Rothko; many of his paintings consist of large-scale combinations of soft-edged, solidly coloured rectangular spaces that tend to glimmer and resonate.

Abstract Expressionism cast a important influence on both the American and European art circles during the fifties. Indeed, the movement marked the shift of the creative centre of modern day painting from Paris to New York City throughout the postwar decades. During the decade of the 50s, the the youth of the movement increasingly followed the leadership of the colour-field painters. By the 60s, the young practitioners had largely shifted away from the extreme expressiveness of the action painters.

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