Pandora Blake
So there's a British pornographer whose career, aesthetic, work, and drive I really admire, Pandora Blake (NSFW link). She ran (past tense) the very lovely website DreamsOfSpanking.com.
There's this evil, patriarchal, boundary-overstepping British regulatory agency, ATVOD, that passed a law/regulation/encyclical/evil-scroll-of-doom banning all sorts of pornography, back in late 2014. Here's a relevant quote from an article from the British newspaper/blog The Independent.
The Audio Visual Media Services regulations (AVMS) banned sex acts that were deemed morally damaging or life-threatening, including strangulation, face-sitting and fisting. Spanking beyond what was deemed to be a gentle level, humiliation, full bondage and restraint (which involves a gag and all four limbs), female ejaculation, and depictions of non-consensual sex were also forbidden under the laws enforced by the Authority for Television on Demand (Atvod), which has since been overtaken by Ofcom.
(The boldfacing and italicizing are mine.)
What a load of sex-negative, woman-hating trash! Female ejaculation is morally damaging and life threatening?!
I was outraged, as were many. There was a protest, a face-sitting sit-in in front of a government building.
Pandora wasn't going to take this sitting down. (Pun intended.) She protested. She rallied. She went on British mainstream news programs to discuss it. She mounted a legal defense, and would not be silenced.
And you know what? She won.
Ofcom, the British Office of Communications ruled that the law didn't apply to her site at all, and that the ATVOD overstepped their bounds. Ofcom in fact has completely taken over that sort of regulatory work from ATVOD, effectively shutting the agency down.
Sometimes, the good guys win.
WAY TO GO PANDORA!
This morning was all about fond memories of the past.
First, Missy found this picture of me she took at the Chicago Bean (which is really called Cloud Gate).
That's me in the blue and green backpack. You can see Missy "bean" reflected in the sculpture taking my picture. (She's in the green hoodie.)
We were there for CapCon. We slipped away to do a bunch of touristy-sightseeing-things, have special time with Brother, too. It was great.
When Missy showed me this picture, I was lying in bed, and through some random googling had found my way back to a website of spanking stories that I used to just absolutely love, Laura's Spanking Corner (NSFW, duh!) . I remember back in the day, there were stories there that just got to me in the strongest way.
Turns out, they still do.
Nostalgia. Gotta love it.